Overview
In recent years, public administration has moved its focus to the management of freight transport. Especially in urban areas, the 'city logistics' concept is being applied in an effort to improve urban infrastructure and improve service quality in the city. Furthermore, the road haulage is due to the high axle loads of the vehicles, planning road maintenance is essential. This issue has motivated provincial administrators in Austria's eastern regions - Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland - to look into the possibility of developing a traffic model for freight transport. The research project under review has brought this idea to realization. The current situation lends itself well to implementation:
- Verkehrsverbund Ost-Region, a company owned by the above provinces, has been operating on the ITS Vienna Region since 2008.
- This online traffic model, which is primarily tasked with calculating current traffic congestions and travel times for online transport services like AnachB.at, is currently being upgraded with a special focus on passenger traffic.
- Austria's traffic model, which is operated by the Ministry for Transport (BMVIT) together with its partners (ÖBB, ASFINAG ...), is due to be updated in the near future. This model also wants to include a freight traffic model. Close cooperation has been concluded between the high-detail traffic model for Austria's eastern regions and the Austria's comprehensive traffic model.
- New types of data are becoming available, ensuring a new level of quality in traffic modelling.
Transport graph Austria - Graph Integration Platform (GIP.gv.at.) is the most detailed and up-to-date Transport Graph Austria. Unlike comparably less established methods for passenger traffic models, reliable approaches to freight traffic modelling are more difficult to get by. The decision-making criteria are more complex for freight traffic participants, there are fewer decision makers and the balancing effect of large numbers is less pronounced - the data is fragmented. In the GÜMORE project, experts from various specialist fields - traffic planning and traffic modelling, logistics, road maintenance, public administration - wanting to work together in an intermodal team, to combine existing methods with new approaches and surveys to create a freight traffic model for road and rail that provides a higher-quality overview of the freight traffic situation, ensuring quicker response to measures and permitting proper forecasting.
This model aims to assess the impact of city logistics measures, support the planning of road maintenance measures and provide logisticians new planning opportunities. The aim is to find new approaches in a dialogue between science and practice. This model is intended to provide quantitative valuation of the measures that are necessary to bring relief to the transport infrastructure and the local population by ensuring accessibility for goods and deliverables. The qualitative change expected soon in the organization and handling of traffic needs this guidance requires reliable fundamental planning data. The submitted freight transport model represents the part that still needs strong innovation impetus.