Freight Demand Forecasting Models: The different approaches

Over the past few decades, the demand for freight transportation services has been steadily increasing due to the abundance of international trade. Freight demand literature has been less abundant than passenger demand although freight participates heavily in traffic congestion, ambient noise and pollution. In order to acknowledge, analyze and improve this situation, different tools were developed to aid decision-making in the transport literature. The goal of this master thesis is to provide an overview of the freight demand forecast models. The first part of this paper will be a literature review of the existing theoretical models to predict freight demand. After a brief explanation of the basic concepts of transport planning, we will examine the classic four-stage transport model as a point of reference and address its limitations. Next, we will provide an introduction to multi-agent systems and review the methods to model freight generation and distribution. The final part of the paper will focus on the review, analysis and comparison of practical models, namely the PLANET model, the TRANS-TOOLS model (which used the ETISplus project database), the FAME model and the ITSAM.