Chapter 8: Modelling the Emergence of Spatiotemporal Structures in Commodity Transport

Logistics and transport systems transform commodity flows between single manufacturing and trading firms into spatiotemporal movement patterns of vehicles on the infrastructures. In order to analyze the impacts of policy measures aiming at influencing the behavior of various logistics actors (such as road pricing instruments, regulation, and market interventions), it is necessary to model decision making in logistics explicitly including the emergence of spatiotemporal logistics structures. This would be similar to activity-based models for passenger transport that deduce the spatiotemporal movement patterns of individuals from their planning problems. Such types of models consider the complex reactions of individuals coherently and allow for a deduction of individual welfare changes.