Author(s)

A. Quattrone

Abstract

In the last decade the considerable growth in European freight transport has almost entirely occurred by road. This increases the importance of understanding and modelling the path choice behaviour of truck-drivers. For explicit path choice modelling two conceptual steps are considered in the literature: 1. generation of the choice set, that is the possible alternatives, and 2. choice among the alternatives belonging to the given choice set. The first phase is particularly relevant in the path choice process where a large number of alternatives are available between each origin and destination in the network. Starting from the consideration that only a subset of all the possible paths (choice set) are actually perceived by truck-drivers, in this paper a specification, calibration and validation of a path generation model is proposed. The choice set generation is realized with the selective multi-criteria approach, explicitly simulating path perception by truck-drivers in an extra-urban network. The path generation model was calibrated and validated on the Italian road network and also using a truck-driver (road-side and commercial vehicle on-board) survey. Keywords: path choice, path generation and perception, road freight transport. 1 Introduction Freight transport plays a fundamental role in the economy of every country. In the last decade the considerable growth in freight transport in European countries has almost entirely occurred by road. Figure 1 shows the percentage share of road freight in total inland freight transport, expressed in tonne-kilometres (tkm). Given the high road share of freight transport in Italy and the large number (approximately 4 million) of commercial vehicles in Italy registered in 2004

Keywords

path choice, path generation and perception, road freight transport.