Modelling and Simulation of a Physical Internet of Transportation Hubs
A paper written by Bill Karakostas presented at the 10th International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies (ANT), April 29 -May 2, 2019, in Leuven, Belgium
A Physical Internet of hubs (‘PI-hubs’) is a network of logistics terminals that allow shipments to flow through, similar to the flow of Internet data packets. PI-hub networks are a recent proposal and their properties have not been studied in detail. In this paper we model Pl-hub networks using the theory of queuing networks, particularly, Jackson queuing networks. Under certain assumptions, Pl-hub networks behave like Jackson queuing networks, and thus analytical methods can be used to calculate important properties such as throughputs, processing times, traffic size etc. In this paper we analyse the performance characteristics (throughput, queue size) for each PI-hub and for the whole PI-hub network.
