Towards an integrated modeling and simulation framework for freight transportation in metropolitan areas

Freight transportation at distribution nodes such as marine ports, airports and rail yards has been putting tremendous environmental pressure in metropolitan areas. A prerequisite for proposing any solution that would make the existing systems more efficient is an accurate analysis and understanding of freight movements. A single model cannot fully capture aspects of freight transportation which interact and affect each other in a complex manner. Rather, integration of a variety of legacy simulation and analysis tools along with holistic optimization is a necessity for freight transportation system design. This paper proposes an integrated modeling and simulation framework for freight transportation using semantic web technology which offers benefits of modularity, extensibility and reusability of both code and design to the applications. We discuss the implementation strategies and methods to achieve these goals and identify some of the key research challenges in realizing our framework vision.