Energy consumption estimation with a shipper transport chain survey

This survey will enable to estimate energy consumed per types of transport chains and to modelise the power consequences of the companies’ logistic choices, crossing energy consumption w

ENERGY CONSUMPTION ESTIMATION WITH A SHIPPER & TRANSPORT CHAIN

SURVEY

Christophe Rizet

INRETS, 2 av Malleret-Joinville, 94110 Arcueil, France

Tel + 33 1 47 40 72 21 ; Email rizet@inrets.fr

Jimmy Armoogum

INRETS, 2 av Malleret-Joinville, 94110 Arcueil, France

Tel + 33 1 47 40 72 71 ; Email armoogum@inrets.fr

Philippe Marchal

INRETS, 2 av Malleret-Joinville, 94110 Arcueil, France

Tel + 33 1 47 40 72 30 ; Email marchal@inrets.fr

A BSTRACT

French Shipper surveys have been designed to analyse the determinants of freight transport demand They incorporate two major components: the tracing of a selection of shipments from their departure from the plant up to their arrival to the consignee and the description of the shippers’ organizational features influencing its transport choices Based on the same principle, a new survey is being launched in France, that has been adapted to analyse energy consumed in freight transport These improvements relate to the questionnaire, to the

distances in the CAPI and to the sampling

The new questionnaire includes the data necessary to compute energy consumption, such as vehicle characteristics, empty running and weight of the total load in the case of grouping The new survey is based on a CAPI that integrates a pre-geocoded list of worldwide origin and destination place names This will increase significantly the quality of distances, and therefore energy consumption estimations; it will also enable a quick visual validation of the multimodal transport chains obtained during the survey realization, which allows calling back the operators in case of erroneous information In the new survey, the sampling has been optimised in order to increase the accuracy of estimation

This survey will enable to estimate energy consumed per types of transport chains and to modelise the power consequences of the companies’ logistic choices, crossing energy

consumption with the logistical characteristics of the shipper Our paper explains the results

of an analysis on energy consumption that has been done with previous shipper surveys, in order to adapt the survey methodology to this problem of energy, and the improvements introduced in the 2003 survey to quantify energy consumed in freight transport at a

disaggregate level These improvements deal with the questionnaire, with the geocoding of origins and destinations and the improvement of distances, and the optimisation of the sample

1 E NERGY C ONSUMPTION A ND S HIPPER S URVEYS

Over one quarter of Green House gas emissions in France comes from the transport sector and this share is growing: there is no sign of saturation of energy use in transportation Therefore, climate change requires profound changes in world transportation, either in the form of

energy efficiency improvements or by changing transport demand We are beginning to understand the determinants of demand, as expressed in vehicle-kilometres, for passenger travel (vehicle ownership, age, location) and the consequence these determinants have on energy consumption, pollution and green house gas emission; These determinants are much less well known for freight, while effective intervention with a view to reducing the impact of road and air freight requires in-depth knowledge about the factors that influence firms in their logistical choices This lack of knowledge is due to several factors: the theoretical complexity

of the problem, the insufficiencies of resources that have been made available for freight compared with passenger transport, and the inadequacy of the existing data With regard to the last point, the “shipper” surveys that INRETS has developed seem to us to have

considerable, as yet unexploited potential

This paper explains the methodology used to cope with the estimation of energy consumption

in the new 2003-2004 survey: the analysis made on previous surveys data to test this

possibility and the different improvements made to the survey methodology in order to adapt the questionnaire, to improve the distance calculation and the checking of transport chains coherence and to optimise the sampling

1.1 French Shipper Surveys

Since the first survey in 1988, French Shipper surveys have been designed to analyse the determinants of freight transport demand They incorporate two major components: the

tracing of a selection of shipments from their departure from the plant up to their arrival to the consignee and the description of the shippers’ organizational features influencing its transport choices In this paper, we describe how the new 2003 shipper survey has been adapted to enable the analysis of energy consumed in freight transportation and to relate it to the

determinants of freight transport demand

In order to analyse freight transport demand, in particular in the case of complex transport chains, INRETS has developed a monitoring system, which is known as the shipper surveys This was successfully used for the first time in France in 1988 The main objectives are:

- to obtain knowledge about freight transport chains from end to end in terms of how modes

or vehicles interconnect, and also the manner in which the chains are organized;

- to provide an understanding of the logistical determinants of the shippers, on the basis of, in particular, the nature of the activity, the size and the logistical choices of the shipper, and also with a view to conducting modelling

- A new objective in the 2003 Shipper and Operator Survey (SOS) is to quantify energy consumed in freight transport, at a very disaggregate level As many other transport data, energy data cannot be directly measured ‘in the field’ but needs to be estimated with the aid of mathematical model (Garrido 2003) When energy is known, pollutant emissions can be computed with a specific emission factor for each type of pollutant and vehicle

1.2 Data Collection in the Survey

In the French shipper surveys, data is collected at three levels (Rizet & al., 2003)

- At the level of the shipper company: after a few questions about the volume and structure of the company’s ingoing and outgoing transport flows and its own fleet of vehicles, a face-to-face interview is administered to the logistics manager of the company, that covers the

economic characteristics of the firm, with regard to its production, distribution and storage practices, its relationships with its customers and suppliers, and the management and

communications systems it uses This description of the firm’s industrial and logistical

organization is supplemented by a “transport” section, which deals with the firm’s

relationships with carriers, terms of access to the various types of infrastructure, and how responsibility for transport is shared between the firm and its partners

- At the consignment level: at the end of the company questionnaire, the last 20 consignments are listed, of which 3 are randomly selected and then followed until they reach their final consignee The consignment questionnaires, which are filled in either with the manager

mentioned above or the manager in charge of dispatching, deal with the economic relationship between the shipper and the customer and the terms of business between the two, in particular

as regards deadlines; the physical and economic characteristics of the consignment are

described as is the division of responsibilities with regard to transport organization and the contractual allocation of transport costs and associated services The first information required

in order to reconstruct transport chains is also collected at this level, with the identification of the consignee and the operators to whom the firm has entrusted the consignment The

different participants identified here are interviewed in their turn by telephone, not face-to-face

- At the participants and journey links level, questionnaires, which must be fairly short as they are administered by telephone, relate to the economic characteristics of the aforementioned participants (activity, status, size, location), the information systems and transport application software used, and the use of rail- road combined transport They also give a picture of the role the participant plays with regard to the consignment, its links with the shipper, the consignee

or the principal, and the services provided The participants have themselves contacted other participants who are identified so they can be questioned in their turn so the description of the transport chain will be complete up to the final consignee The transport leg questionnaires are filled in by the participants who have performed transport These questionnaires break down the transport operation into as many legs as there are modes, vehicles or stops which are required in order to process the freight (logistical services such as product finishing, labelling, packaging, grouping/degrouping operations, etc.) The information collected can be used to identify intermediate points of passage and the services which are provided there (in particular grouping with other goods in the same vehicle), to reconstruct the distances and various journey and transit time and to find out the weight of the entire load carried by the vehicle

The transport chains are therefore reconstructed by passing from one participant to the next,

on the basis of the task each has performed This monitoring has been conducted up either to the French frontier (in the 1988 survey) or throughout Western Europe (in a test survey

conducted in 1999 as well as in the 2003 survey) and includes an interview with the

consignees in Western European countries For consignments which travel beyond this limit, only the participants who operated in Europe are questioned, with journeys being

reconstructed until the first transfer point after the frontier has been crossed The data needed

for energy analysis principally concerns the “leg” and “journey” levels, the latter being

considered as a succession of legs or transport chains Energy consumption is expressed in Grammes of Oil Equivalent (goe) and sometimes related to tonne-kilometre of the shipment (goe/tkm) in order to compare the energetical efficiency of different shipments or types of shipments

In order to adapt the survey to this objective of quantifying freight transport energy

consumption and the influence of logistical practices on energy consumption, we used two small samples from 1999 surveys

2 E STIMATION O F ENERGY CONSUMPTION: A T EST W ITH

T HE 1999 D ATA

Using two 1999 small samples, we tried to estimate energy consumed per shipment and to evaluate the potential of shipper surveys for analysing freight transport energy consumption in relation to the logistical decisions made by companies The main objective of this exercise, was to propose improvements to the questionnaires, to quantify energy consumption at the very disaggregate level in the new shipper survey that started in 2003 (Rizet & Keïta 2002) Using the former survey data (before specific adaptatio n), energy consumed per shipment has been estimated as follows: consumption has been ‘modelised’ per type of vehicle; with these models, the energy consumed by the vehicle is estimated per leg, on the basis of the distance covered A proportion of the cons umed fuel is then assigned to the consignment, on the basis

of the percentage of the total load it represents and finally, the energy consumptions of all the legs in the transport chain are summed for the consignment

2.1 Road Transport

For road vehicles, on the basis of published work, we identified a specific per vehicle

consumption for the different types of vehicle that the survey distinguishes between We concentrated on the influence of the load, the only variable known in the previous survey so

we used the results from Roumegoux (1995), which are summarised in the table below

Table 1: Unitary consumption and mean speeds for different types of vehicle and road

depending on the load

Vehicle and weight

(empty

full load)

Load

Speed (km/h)

Consump

(l./100)

Speed (km/h)

Consump

(l./100)

Van (1.8 t.)

Van (3.5 t.) Full load 74.2 10.8 117.7 17.0

Lorry (12.0 t.)

Lorry (19.0 t.) Full load 66.8 28.2 84.7 29.5

Articulated (13.5 t.)

Articulated (40.0 t.) Full load 62.2 43.6 75.6 42.1

(Source: Roumégoux 1995)

Finally, for road transport, using these data, we estimated fuel consumption, in litres/ 100 km, as: Consumption = 0.892 total weight + 10.0

In the test using the 1999 data, we considered an average deadhead run coefficient for each type of vehicle, as estimated from the national road freight transport survey (Transports Routiers de Marchandises – TRM) conducted by the French Ministry of Transport The

estimated energy consumption in litres has been converted to goe with the density of diesel fuel taken at 0.84 kg per litre One improvement in the 2003 survey is that empty running will

be asked for each leg, instead of using national coefficient

2.2 Other Modes

For non-road modes, in the previous surveys, it was not possible to apply this method,

because neither the type of vehicle nor the weight of the total load was known For this test,

we simply applied a national per tonne-kilometre average consumption for each mode, using French figures estimated on an average national basis

For air transport, the energy consumption estimated is that of a Boeing B737, the most-used plane in Europe, which has been estimated on the basis of the MEET Project’s Work

(Kalivoda & Kudrna, 1997) The following relationship has been used between the

consumption (in tonnes of kerosene), the payload (in tonnes) and the distance covered

consumption (/t of payload) = 0.0002*distance + 0.024

It should be noted that this consumption would be lower with an Airbus A310 or A320; what

we have here, therefore, is an upper bound To calculate per leg consumption we have used an average loading rate of 50% in tonnage, a deadhead run rate of 15% and taken the density of kerosene as 0.8 kg/litre This gives average energy efficiency for air freight transport of nearly

500 goe/tkm

For other modes we used data provided by the ADEME (the French Agency for Energy)

Table 2: Energy consumption for non-road modes (goe / t.km)

Combined transport 11.7

Self-powered barge 12.6

Source: based on ADEME data, taking 1 kWh = 222 goe as the primary energy equivalence (at production)

The main improvement in the 2003 survey is to give the elements to compute energy

consumption per leg, for non-road modes as well as for road legs, instead of using national average figures: the new questionnaire includes question on the type of vehicle and the weight

of the total load carried during the journey

2.3 The Variability of Consumptions per Transport Chain

For observed road legs in the 1999 surveys, the estimated consumption for a shipment, in goe, has been divided by the number of tonne-kilometres travelled to get a ‘unitary consumption’,

in goe/tkm These unitary consumption figures of road legs vary greatly, from 20 to more than 100,000 goe/tkm Three factors are important to explain this variation of consumption per consignment and per leg:

- The consumption is calculated on the basis of the total weight of the vehicle estimated on the basis of its capacity: consumption varies between 45.7 l/100 km for a 25 t payload vehicle, that is to say 1.82 l per payload tonne/100 km and 11.3 l/100 km for a small 1.5 t payload

lorry, that is to say 7.53 l per payload tonne; the ratio of consumption per payload tonne varies between 1 and 4.1

- The computed per consignment fuel consumption also takes account of a deadhead run coefficient which, for the 1999 surveys, is roughly estimated on the basis of the payload category and the type of transport operation: this varies from 20% for small hire and reward lorries to 56% for large own account vehicles, i.e a ratio of 1 to 1.3

- In particular, the consumption that is assigned to a consignment takes account of the loading rate of the vehicle (which is the reciprocal of the vehicle capacity utilization coefficient, that

is the ratio between the weight of a load and the payload) which can vary between 1 (when the weight of the load is equal to the capacity) to 25 t / 5 kg (a vehicle with the maximum capacity with the smallest load) i.e a ratio of 1 to 5000

The minimum road transport unitary consumption is then 20 goe/tkm, for a vehicle carrying

25 t (maximum authorized load) in hire and reward operation and the maximum is more than 100,000 goe/tkm, for the same vehicle carrying 5kg in own account operation It is clearly the weight of the load which is mainly responsible for the dispersion of unitary consumptions

For modes other than road transport, the consumptions have been estimated directly by

applying a unitary consumption figure to the kilometre tonnage of the consignment on the leg: there is therefore no dispersion Average values can be computed either for each transport mode or for each type of transport chain, summing of the energy consumption for different legs For non-road transport chains, end legs make a relatively minor contribution to

consumption: the average values for transport chains are still about 30 goe/tkm for exclusively road chains and the values for the other chains are similar to those used for the principal mode: around 500 goe/tkm for air chains, 13 for river transport, 8 to 16 for rail (depending on the percentage of full trains), 10 to 12 for rail-road combined transport, 5 for sea transport

The variability of unitary consumptions for road transport legs is the most surprising result of this analysis; one consequence, for other modes, is that our highly simplified data fail to show this variability, is inappropriate to analyse this reality Another consequence is that the

computation of average consumptions for a type of consignment is very imprecise; this

variability leads to a lack of accuracy when we measure average energy consumptions, for example when comparing different subgroups to test some hypothesis

2.4 The Low Accuracy Of Average Energy Consumption

Different hypothesis were tested to analyse the influence of logistical choices on energy consumption One of these tests was on Just- in-time (JIT): we classified shipments in 3 group s according to the delivery time requested by the customer Then we compared the characteristics of these 3 groups of shipments (Rizet & Keïta 2002) The first result is that the average weight of consignments is lower when the delivery time is short In the table below average unitary consumptions seem to follow the same trend: they are lower for the least urgent consignments as these can use rail and sea transport However, the confidence intervals, linked to the accuracy of the estimators of average cons umption, are so low that it is not possible to reach a definite conclusion on this point

Table 3: unitary consumption (Goe/tkmSL) according to the requested maximum delivery time

unitary consumption unitary consumption Delivery time

Observ

number Average Conf interv

Observ

number Average Conf interv

Of course this problem of confidence interval should be improved by the size of the sample in the 2003 survey (30 times more important than in each of the 1999 surveys) Nevertheless the problem keeps serious and several improvements where introduced in the new survey to upgrade the accuracy of our estimate

3 G EOCODING A ND T HE D ISTANCES

The new survey is based on a CAPI that integrates a pre-geocoded list of worldwide origin and destination place names The aspects related to geocoding and distances estimation are considered here in 3 stages: firstly in the preparation process before the realization of the survey, a worldwide list of pre-geocoded places has been integrated in the CAPI; secondly during the realization, a tool enables the cartographic checking of the multimodal transport chains collected; and finally in the processing of the collected data distances are computed

3.1 Setting Up A Lists of Pre-Geocoded Places In the CAPI

Unlike our previous surveys, the new shipper survey has been designed with

computer-assisted methods (CAPI and CATI) The initial question concerning location data collection was how to « feed » this software In the case of France, an existing consistent database has been integrated in the CAPI, for the steps where precise place names or transport terminals used are asked Taking into account the coverage of the survey and the rate of international shipments to be surveyed, a method has been designed to obtain equivalent lists for foreign countries

During the test period of the survey, a draft database, partially extracted from NIMA database, from National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has been used The main problem with this draft database was the presence of double values in the full name We had for example three « Frankfurt » in Germany, but the interviewer was unable to detect which one in the list was the « main Frankfurt », which one was the ‘small’ city near Nuremberg, or the ‘small’ city near Berlin Considering the number of place names in the NIMA database

(approximately 5 million names), it was impossible to imagine a « manual » elimination of these double names for the whole database An automated process has been developed, using another worldwide database containing a limited number of cities, but with population

estimates

This process is based on the detection, for each NIMA place, of the nearest important city, taking into account a population threshold adapted for each country The distance between the double value and this important city was also added in the new generated name With this method, the three identical « Frankfurt » in the initial database became:

Frankfurt /45/Nurnberg

Frankfurt /82/Berlin

Frankfurt /0/Frankfurt

The figures between « slash » indicate the straight- line distance, in kilometre This format was chosen taking into account the specification of the CAPI, particularly the limitation in the number of characters Additionally, and to adapt to the coverage of the survey which supposes the interview of transport companies abroad, these important cities are indicated in French, but also in the local language or in English

When for a given country, a place is not detected in the list used in the CAPI, the interviewer input this name totally by hand, and additionally asks for the name of the nearest important city: this relatively rare occurrence will be the subject of a particular processing to obtain a consistent set of geocoded places

The CAPI thus set up, with an auto- incremented filter in the list of places will firstly limit the data entry duration for the interviewer, and therefore the global duration of the interview, and indirectly the global quality of the data collected It will also reduce significantly the risks of misspelled names

3.2 Validation Of The Multimodal Transport Chains

The first work consists in getting consistency between the places resulting directly from the lists of the CAPI, with those input by hand With this intention, various algorithms of

similarity tests between strings are applied: each non- geocoded place is compared for a given country to the whole of the places present in the list of the CAPI, and the results are sorted according to their "similarity rate" This semi-automatic process makes it possible to quickly correct possible spelling mistakes The additional information on the nearest important city allows to decide between the possible double values obtained When this method does not make it possible to identify a place with certainty, the observation collected for this leg is temporarily unused, before a complementary validation process from the interviewers

On the basis of the complete set of geocoded observations, several checks are performed The first commonplace work consists in checking the correct sequence of the various places used

in the successive legs of the same shipment Immediate work with geocoded places also makes it possible to control for a given mode sequence collected, consistency between the means of transport used, and the real possibilities offered, taking into account the geography

of the areas or countries concerned, and the knowledge of the infrastructure and services A simple geometrical checking then makes it possible to detect the shipments containing badly informed places used: the sum of the straight-line distances of the various legs is reported to the « direct » straight- line distance between the origin of the first leg of the shipment, and the destination of its last leg When this ratio of distances is higher tha n 2, a manual checking is operated, to understand which part of the shipment could be badly indicated

The chains considered as "non-suspect" at the end of this process are quickly visually checked

on a map, with the shipment cartographic control tool designed The processing duration of these controls being relatively low, after reception of the intermediate files of the survey, it is possible to ask the interviewer to call back the corresponding company, in order to correct the data and limit the number of unusable shipments

3.3 Distances And Alternate Chains Of Transport

In the previous shipper surveys, the distances for road were estimated on the basis of straight-line, applying a global correction factor, without taking into account the geographical

characteristics of the countries and regions, or the development of the motorway network

In the 1999 survey analysis, energy consumptions have been related to kilometre tonnages on the basis of the distance covered by the consignment on transport networks We have also related them to kilometre tonnages on the basis of straight- line distances (per/tkmSL) in order

to assess the impact of the roundabout route followed by consignments either because of the networks, or because they need to transit through a terminal in order to be grouped together, which generally involves an additional distance between the consignment’s origin and final destination By comparing the unitary consumptions for these two types of distance (straight line and network distance), we can measure the “excess consumption” caused by the

lengthening of distances because of the form of the networks or because of passing through a transhipment point In the case of road chains, this unitary excess consumption amounts to 29%; for own transport operations, we have confirmed that excess consumption is greater in the case of chains with multiple legs (44 and 54% respectively for the NPDC and Mystic Surveys) than for chains with a single leg (21 and 26%)

In the 2003 survey, when all the chains reconstituted in the end of the previous processing are considered as valid, the "real" distances on the modal networks are then estimated for each leg This “routing” aspect is based on the use of network databases The networks are detailed enough for road, rail and waterborne estimations inside Europe In the case of intercontinental shipments, a great circle distance calculation tool is used for marine and air legs One of the main advantages of working with precise origin-destination shipments will be the possibility

of testing alternative transport policy, especially those aimed at road traffic limitation This approach will allow estimating the effect on energy consumption for the same set of origin-destination links, by generating alternate transport chains, evaluated with a modal share model

4 O PTIMISING T HE S AMPLE

When estimating energy consumed for a type of transport, two types of inaccuracy may arise: sampling inaccuracy, i.e errors caused by the fact that we observe only a sample and not the whole population, and non-sampling errors which are mainly due measurement errors and to non-response The estimation of energy consumption per shipment depends on the mode of transport, the type and age of vehicle, the tonnage of the shipment, the tonnage of the load (weight of all the shipments in the vehicle), the distance travelled, etc Some of these

variables are very difficult or impossible to collect

In the light of the high cost of this survey and of the available budget, the 2003 sample will be around 3230 firms that are 9700 shipments To have a sufficient number of observations on the different modes, this sample is designed to obtain about one third of non-truck shipments (with a random sample we sho uld have only 5% of non-truck shipments), more precisely we want at least 8% railway shipments (i.e nearly 800 railways shipments), 8% maritime

shipments; 8% air shipments, 4% (400) combined rail- road shipments and 2% (200) river shipments; furthermore, we want 25% of international shipments and, because of the Nord Pas-de Calais region’s contribution in the funding of the survey, we want 900 firms from this region