Modeling the global freight transportation system: A multi-level modeling perspective

The interconnectedness of different actors in the global freight transportation industry has rendered such a system as a large complex system where different sub-systems are interrelated. On such a system, policy-related-exploratory analyses which have predictive capacity are difficult to perform. Although there are many global simulation models for various large complex systems, there is unfortunately very little research aimed to develop a global freight transportation model. In this paper, we present a multi-level framework to develop an integrated model of the global freight transportation system. We employ a system view to incorporate different relevant sub-systems and categorize them in different levels. The four-step model of freight transport is used as the basic foundation of the framework proposed. In addition to that, we also present the computational framework which adheres to the high level modeling framework to provide a conceptualization of the discrete-event simulation model which will be developed.