Modeling transnational surface freight flow and border crossing improvement.

摘要

Transportation costs are known to significantly impact the level of trade between regions. This is especially true for international truck-based movements requiring passage through border crossings. Movement through border crossings often involves assessment of additional costs such as tolls and transshipment fees, as well as the time consumed by the many operational and procedural difficulties encountered at these locations.; The costs associated with negotiating international borders are relatively well known and many agencies and organizations are actively working to reduce them. Various solutions exist for effective improvement, involving both physical and policy related changes. Traditionally, improvements to border crossings have been justified based on their impact to a localized area of interest. However, this type of planning fails to consider how a facility's improvement might affect the transportation system as a whole.; This dissertation addresses the impact that border crossing improvement may have on existing patterns of truck activity. Of particular interest is how improvements to crossings can initiate changes to flow patterns observed throughout the transportation system. To facilitate trade among regions, the primary goal for border improvement is to minimize the total transport cost associated with all international freight movements. Given this goal, an optimization model, the Transshipment Facility Improvement Problem (TFIP), is proposed as a tool for modeling the effects of border crossing improvement on trucking between countries.; In order to evaluate the impact of crossing improvement on the cost of system-wide truck transportation, the TFIP is applied to the case of North American (United States, Mexico, and Canada) trucking. This application consists of two challenges: (1) obtaining and modeling current trade volumes moved by motor carriers between countries, and (2) modeling the effects of border facility improvement on the cost of moving these volumes. A methodology is developed for meeting each of these goals. Application of these methodologies allows for current activity patterns to be modeled and analyzed, and the simulated impacts of various crossing improvement schemes on North American truck transport to be investigated.