Estimated Data Production for Urban Goods Transport Diagnosis - Sustainable Urban Logistics: Concepts, Methods and Information Systems - page 112

However, we find a small number of approaches that have given rise to operational
tools used by public authorities and private stakeholders, mainly for diagnoses
related to strategic planning.
At the end of the 1980s, the Senate of Berlin proposed a tool to West Germany's
public authorities for including commercial transport flows in traffic studies. The
result was the WIVER model (Meimbresse and Sonntag 2001 ) which was first
presented at Sonntag ( 1985 ). It is based on several in-depth surveys carried out at
nearly 9,000 premises (Munich, Berlin, Hamburg) and specific surveys of drivers
regarding their traffic behaviour. This software tool has been used in more than 15
German cities for transport planning studies, as well in Rome and the Lazio region
(Italy), Madrid and its hinterland (Spain) and the Brussels metropolitan region
(Belgium). WIVER, initially integrated in the software program VISEVA to esti-
mate both passenger and goods movements in urban areas, has been included
recently in the VISUM modelling framework, 2 a commercial tool from PTV traffic,
and one of the best-known transport demand models. However, nothing is known
about the current uses of the commercial transport module of VISUM. Also in
Germany, the company IVV Aachen developed a specific module to include goods
transport in its urban transport planning software, VENUS (Janssen and Vollmer
2005 ). This model has a classical four-step framework (Ogden 1992 ) to estimate
goods transport flows by vehicle type and trip purpose (Ambrosini et al. 2008 ). The
software is currently available, but the acceptance and main use of the goods
module is unknown (Gonzalez-Feliu et al. 2012a ).
In Italy, the Emilia-Romagna Region developed the specific urban goods
estimation model, CITY GOODS (Gentile and Vigo 2006 ), as part of the City
Ports project of the INTERREG program (Rosini 2005 ). The model deals with two
main questions: the search for the generation determinants (related to the move-
ments and not to the quantity of freight) of the different supply chains, and con-
structing vehicle routes for urban deliveries and pickups (changing from
movement to commodity). Although a hybrid model combining commodity and
movement as modelling units (Comi et al. 2012 ) has been proposed by Slavin
( 1976 ), CITY GOODS is the first operational model of this category. The main
scientific contribution of this model is the typology of economic activities to
estimate generation determinants and their importance at urban level (Gentile and
Vigo 2013 ). Several Italian cities have used CITY GOODS for their urban plans,
mainly in Emilia Romagna, where the tool has been adopted by transport planning
departments of the main cities.
Mention should also be made of the Nätra software in Sweden (Eriksson 1997 )
and the CROW framework in Norway. Such frameworks were applied in the late
90s in their respective countries. Moreover, some experimental works that have
not yet been considered operable tools have been applied to real contexts and used
for real planning issues (Wisetjindawat and Sano 2003 ; Hunt and Stefan 2007 ;
2 This statement was made by a PTV engineer at the First Commercial/Goods Transport
Conference in Berlin at the beginning of 2012.