System Dynamics Simulation Modeling of Transportation Engineering, Energy, and Economy Interaction for Sustainability

Abstract

India’s crude oil import is growing phonemically and is likely to grow more, thereby posing a major threat to the economy of the country. A robust policy direction is a need of the hour. Since there is a lack of study in analyzing the inter-relationship among the sectors of transportation, energy, and economy, this research work is aimed at performing an in-depth study of these sectors by considering the parameters such as vehicular population, model split, fuel consumption, and fuel costs. System dynamic (SD) simulation models are built using the STELLA software, and these parameters are forecasted for the future years until 2026. In this research work, when the existing trend of growth rate for these sectors was assumed to continue over a horizon year (2026), it was found that a large part of the economy is being spent for meeting the energy demands. So SD simulation models are built in which a scenario of increasing the growth rate of public transportation and at the same time curbing the growth rate of personalized transportation with a modal split value between the both as 70:30 showed a considerable decrease of 29.49% in fuel consumption and 58.04% in fuel cost. This modal split under the desirable scenario has resulted in a savings of 14,629 crore rupees for the horizon year in the road transport sector for Chennai city, India. Finally, this study recommends that in order to achieve sustainability in the city, the model split between public and personalized modes of transportation has to be paid crucial attention.