A Dynamic Spatial Price Equilibrium Model of Integrated Urban Production-Transportation Operations Considering Freight Delivery Tours

José Holguín-Veras (), Ning Xu (), Miguel Jaller () and John Mitchell ()
Additional contact information
José Holguín-Veras: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Director VREF Center of Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems; Director of the Center for Infrastructure, Transportation, and the Environment, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York 12180
Ning Xu: Revenue Management, Virgin America, Burlingame, California 94010
Miguel Jaller: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California Davis, Davis, California 95616
John Mitchell: Department of Mathematics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York 12180

Transportation Science, 2016, vol. 50, issue 2, 489-519

Abstract: This paper introduces a dynamic spatial price equilibrium model that estimates urban freight-related flows for integrated producer-carrier operations that compete in a market where a generic commodity is traded. The model is applicable to cases where suppliers compete in a market by producing a commodity that is delivered to customers by means of delivery tours. The model obtains the patterns of commodity flows, production levels, and delivery tours that maximize economic welfare. The model is then reinterpreted as a Nash equilibrium model, where a set of suppliers deploys strategies involving production and delivery decisions to maximize profits, that is then solved with a heuristic approach that decomposes the interrelated decisions into how much to produce, how best to deliver to customers, and how much to charge for the cargo. Once the suppliers make these decisions, a market-clearing mechanism determines the amount of supplies that the various consumer nodes purchase from the suppliers. At this stage, the suppliers readjust their market strategies in anticipation of the next time period. The process ends when equilibrium is reached. Three different dynamics of the suppliers’ decisions on production levels are tested to gain insight into how efficiently each helps to reach the equilibrium solutions. By developing a model that explicitly considers delivery tours, the paper makes a significant contribution to the fields of spatial price equilibrium and freight demand modeling.

Keywords: freight demand modeling; freight tours; spatial price equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2015.0616 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ortrsc:v:50:y:2016:i:2:p:489-519

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transportation Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().