In The Netherlands inland shipping is the most important modality, measured in ton-kms, for international goods transport destined for North of France, Germany, and the countries beyond. To support maximum inland navigation growth and infrastructure investment efficiency an evaluating framework for infrastructure investments is needed, which is the inland navigation model system. Part of the complexity of the inland navigation model is in deriving the consignment sizes from the macro economic cargo flow data and next deriving the shiploads from these consignments. It is preferable to have a descriptive model for this conversion problem such that effects of policies on infrastructure, but also on fleet composition, shipper locations and shipper volumes can be made visible. In the paper alternative structures and sub models are investigated and evaluated. The proposed structure to model the inland navigation traffic conversion problem is a complex structure, which best approached the market mechanisms. First shipments are extracted, single and multiple part shiploads are defined and combinations of part shiploads are made resulting in shiploads. These shiploads are used for the ship and route choice model in which the cheapest ship and route combination is chosen. More research is needed before this model structure can be widely used. This model structure could in the future be of interest to other modalities as well. Road and rail goods transport markets have similar characteristics for the traffic modelling problem. The big advantage of the inland shipping market is the relative good information availability. For the covering abstract see ITRD E124693.
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