Research on Demand Forecasting of Multimodal Transport Hubs Based on Network Transportation Cost Analysis

Logistics hub is a logistics facility group and logistics activity organization center that centrally realizes the functions of goods storage, distribution, and transshipment. It is the core infrastructure of multimodal transport organization. The traditional planning and location methods of multimodal transport hub (MTH) mostly use the means of qualitative analysis on the basis of comprehensive consideration of economic development scale, industrial structure layout, and transportation convenience. It is less likely to screen and layout MTH by directly predicting the transshipment demand between different transportation modes. Based on the construction of the double-layer comprehensive transportation network composed of national highways and railways, this paper uses the transportation assignment theory to allocate the freight demand of China to the comprehensive transportation network under the goal of minimizing the transportation cost. Then, the highway and railway replacement demand of each alternative hub node is calculated. Through case analysis, the following conclusions are obtained. The traffic distribution theory used in urban traffic planning can be used for freight demand distribution prediction. The freight volume of each mode and the reload freight volume of each MTH can be calculated by distributing the freight demand to the double-layer transportation network. The goods with short transportation distance are more likely to be transported by road, while the goods with long transportation distance are more likely to be transported by highway and railway combined transport. The research conclusions of this paper can provide technical support for the decision-making of location selection and scale calculation of MTH, and promote the hub layout to be more scientific and reasonable.