The upcoming Trans-Eurasian Route, a rail-bound land bridge between Europe, Central Asia and the Chinese hinterland, as part of the Chinese government's One-Belt-One-Road initiative, opens up new interesting opportunities for cross-border transportation, especially for trade and development of the participating countries. In order to foster the use of this route, the chinese government has decided to provide massive subsidies, which are especially interesting for westbound chinese exports. This leads to a large imbalance in the transport volumes, which are about 2/3 westbound and 1/3 eastbound. As a result, unused capacities are attractive in particular for European exports.

International transport concepts generally provide transport by sea for low-priced time-uncritical goods, and air freight transport for time-critical, perishable or high-priced goods. However, with the launch of the trans-Eurasian route, there is now a new transportation option that has the potential to take over some capacities of maritime transportation and air freight. Thus, new export opportunities can be opened up (for which the transport has not been worthwhile so far from a time or monetary point of view) as well as environmental protection can be taken into account by avoiding the combustion of heavy oil (maritime transport) as well as kerosene (air transport).

The objective of the project is to discuss the new possibilities of Trans-Eurasian rail transport for shippers and the forwarding companies commissioned by them within the framework of a simulation model and to develop from this a market segmentation with regard to the different transport modes. The initial basis will be a simulation model in which seaports and airports as nodes as well as the entire Trans-Eurasian rail route and different types of shippers and forwarders will be represented. The use of agent-based simulation brings the advantage of being able to derive an overall view of the problem from the behavior of individual actors. Thus, on the one hand, a global view should be derived from the situation of individual shippers and, on the other hand, the different transport modes should be represented in detail using real or stochastic data. In addition, a simulation model allows the usage by third parties and a comprehensive visualization.

Duration: October 2020 to August 2021

Funding: Hessen Agentur

Project lead: Michael Gleser