On Modeling the Interactions between Freight Terminal Gates and Road Traffic Flows

Since the second half of the last century, the continuous increase of freight demand has generated increasing levels of traffic congestion that, especially for terminals located inside or near the cities, have sometimes become intolerable. In this paper, to the aim of evaluating the impact of freight traffic, a hybrid traffic model for representing the queues of vehicles at junctions or at the gates of freight terminal is proposed. To do so, a set of simple state equations derived from the discrete event dynamics of the queue to be coupled with those representing the traffic dynamics at a macroscopic level. Therefore, the main result of the paper consists of the definition of a compact analytic model of the time-driven and discrete-event dynamics characterizing a traffic network gathering the gates of logistics terminal. A simulation real-world example of the capabilities of the model is also provided.