Integrated Modeling Of The European Trade And Transport Network

Trade and transport statistics are two sides of the same coin. Ideally we would like to have the data on the trade flow between two countries in combination with the information about the split of this flow between various (multi-modal) routes linking the pair of countries. In reality trade and transport statistics are quite difficult to match due to differences in methodology for data collection and the use of surveys. The unification and reconciliation of transport and trade statistics is of great value to both policy makers and the scientific community. The present paper uses the inverse transport network equilibrium problem that simultaneously calculates both the Origin-Destination (OD) matrix of transport flows and estimates the parameters of route choice multinomial logit model on the basis of available transport survey data. The choice of transport network equilibrium model parameters are done in such a way as to minimize the distance between available trade data and the resulting OD matrix. The distance between the two datasets is measured by the entropy function. The methodology presented in this paper has been developed within the framework of the ETIS-Plus project for DG MOVE.