This study deals with the implementation and the application of a decision support system (DSS) for the technical evaluation of new short sea shipping services within the Mediterranean. In more detail, the DSS is made up by a supply model and a demand model. The implementation of the transport supply model is described. The study area encompasses 49 countries, i.e. the EU27 countries plus Eastern Europe and all other Mediterranean coastal countries. Three different networks are implemented for road, rail (both traditional and combined) and maritime services (both Ro-Ro and containerized) respectively, with connections representing rail-road, sea-road and sea-rail intermodal modes. Model specification was designed so as to incorporate policy attributes for an explicit representation of the effects of EUenlargement and of the enforcement of EMFTA agreement. Then, a mode choice model has been specified and estimated, on the basis of aggregated data coming from the above mentioned data sources, for different commodity classes. Two main applications are performed with the above described DSS. Thefirst deals with the EU enlargement to Eastern Countries, with specific reference to the already mentioned requirement for an effective maritime connection to/from the Black Sea. In more detail, in a first step, new maritime connections between Southern Italy, Greek and Black Sea ports are hypothesized in terms both of type of services and frequencies. Then, the assumed frequencies are effectively determined through iterative runs of both supply and demand models, that is solving a fixed point problem. In more detail, at the generic iteration service frequencies obtained from previousiterations (or hypothesized for the first iteration) are introduced into the supply model which provides new origin destination travel times for all frequency segments. These travel times are then introduced both in the generation-distribution and in the mode choice model so as to evaluate the demand attracted by the new services and the frequencies justified by thisdemand. Once determined those services, the whole demand model will be finally applied to evaluate both short and long term impacts in terms of variation of national import/export, freight flows, arc saturations, etc. Thesecond application deals with the enforcement of the EMFTA agreements. The difference in the methodology used for this second application is only in the initial step, wherein a first application of the demand model is performed by varying in model attributes only policy variables related to EMFTA agreements. This allows drawing preliminary information on which origin-destination relations are mostly affected in terms of freight flow increase, to be therefore supported through new services. For the covering abstract see ITRD E145999
Abstract