Dynamic Modeling of Performance Indices for Planning of Sustainable Transportation Systems

Recently, sustainability has become a very important research area in transportation because of the dependencies between transportation, economic, and environmental systems. A great deal of research is being conducted regarding various aspects in order to try to understand these interdependencies. However, still there is a need to capture the behavior of such systems over time. This study attempts to build dynamic models to capture the interdependent behavior of transportation, economic, and environmental systems. The research is motivated by the well-known predator–prey models developed by renowned researchers Lotka and Volterra. Non-linear modeling techniques were utilized to capture the nominal behavior of all the three systems. The results indicated periodic behavior with a phase lag for the performance of transportation and the activity system; the performance of environment system decayed with time. The proposed modeling approach is expected to be helpful to other researchers in enhancing non-linear models for better analysis of sustainable systems.