Agent-based Simulation of Freight Transport between Geographical Zones

AbstractWe present TAPAS-Z, which is an agent-based freight transport analysis model for simulation of decision-making and transport activities. TAPAS-Z is a further development of a simulation model called TAPAS, and it has improved support for simulation of transport in large geographical regions. It is based on the principles that shipments are simulated for chosen supplier-consumer relations in a geographic region, and that the geographic locations of suppliers and consumers are randomly varied for each shipment. In TAPAS-Z, one supplier represents all real-world suppliers in a geographic zone, and one consumer represents all real-world consumers in a zone. In that way, TAPAS-Z is able to capture some of the diversity in freight transport that is caused by the varying geographic locations of senders and receivers, and which is important when assessing the impact of transport policy and infrastructural measures