National sea transport demand and capacity forecasting with system dynamics

The majority of Finnish foreign trade uses maritime transport as a transport unit, and this is why ports are a major part of the Finnish national transport system. A recent trend has also been rising volumes of transit traffic in Finnish ports that are further transported to Russia. In this thesis a system dynamics model is developed for the long term forecasting of the Finnish port system. The purpose of the model is to understand the causal mechanisms that determine the behavior of the entire system. The model can be used to study the effects of changes in the macro economy to the transport system. The model focuses on unit load traffic (i.e. containers, trailers and trucks) and includes the main ports through which most unit load transports pass. The proposed system dynamics model can be divided into three submodules: a) the capacity acquisition process of each port, b) the demand trend estimation process that port owners go through in order to determine the level of desired capacity in a given port and c) the port market share determination process. The total transport demand in the system dynamics model is an exogenous variable which can follow different paths of development corresponding to various macroeconomic scenarios.