A Hybrid Micro-Simulator for Determining the Effects of Governmental Control Policies on Transport Chains

Abstract

Abstract.A simulation-based tool is described which will be used to investigate how the actors in a transport chain are expected to act when different types of governmental control policies are applied, such as, fuel taxes, road tolls, vehicle taxes and requirements on vehicles. The simulator is composed of two layers, one layer simulating the physical activities taking place in the transport chain, e.g., production, storage, and transports of goods, and another layer simulating the different actors' decision-making processes. The decision layer is implemented by a multi-agent system where each agent corresponds to a particular actor and models the way it acts in different situations. The simulator will be used for analyzing the costs and environmental effects, and will in this way provide guidance in decision making regarding control policies. In addition, it will be possible for companies to use the simulator in order to determine cost-effective strategies given different (future) scenarios.

TAPAS: A multi-agent-based model for simulation of transport chains

“…In an earlier version of TAPAS (Bergkvist et al, 2005), the contract net protocol was used for buying products from the supplier offering the best price, and a second contract net protocol was used to buy a matching transportation even though it can be considered hazardous to assume the availability of a cost efficient matching transport solution at the time of buying products.…”

“…The research concerning TAPAS has been going on for several years, and the work has rendered a number of conference publications (e.g., Bergkvist et al, 2005;Holmgren et al, 2007;Ramstedt et al, 2007;Davidsson et al, 2008). This paper extends the previous work by providing a more detailed technical description and better motivation of the design of the TAPAS simulation model.…”

Integrated Optimization and Multi-Agent Technology for Combined Production and Transportation Planning

“…Based on experiences from [10] and [12] experiments can commence of the studied case. Then an interesting issue is to study different strategies for taking advantage of the information from the decomposition approach more closely.…”

“…This is in large a simplification of the general framework suggested in [10]. Here we consider a less general transport chain.…”

“…There are many possible mappings between organizations and the different decision making agents, see [10] for some examples. In the extreme case, all decision makers belong to the same organization for a transport chain, e.g., petroleum companies.…”