Dynamic model development of performance indices for planning of sustainable transportation systems

Sustainability has recently become a very important research area in transportation because of the dependencies between transportation, economic and environmental system. A lot of research is taking place in various aspects that try to understand the interdependencies. However, there is a need to capture the behavior of such systems over time. The research presented in this paper is the first attempt to build dynamic models that try to capture the interdependent behavior of these systems. The research is influenced and motivated by the predator-prey models developed by renowned researchers Lotka and Volterra. The current study is performed to capture the interaction between interdependent systems i.e. transportation system, activity system, and environmental system. To study the interactions from a macro-scale, this research emphasizes non-linear modeling techniques to capture the nominal behavior of all the three systems. The results indicate that the performance of transportation system and the activity system follow a periodic behavior with phase lag, while the performance of environment system decreases with time. The modeling approach proposed in this research will be helpful to other researchers so that they can modify and enhance such models for proper analysis of sustainable systems.