?
Estimating the volume of investment needed for developing a regional freight transportation infrastructure
A decision-support tool for estimating the volume of private investment to develop/modernize a regional freight transportation infrastructure is proposed. The estimates of the required investment volume and those of the amount of the revenue expected to be generated by the infrastructure functioning, which the tool provides, are key ones in negotiations with private investors on forming a potential public-private partnership to finance the development/ modernization of the infrastructure. The tool includes a) a mathematical model underlying three problems formulated on its basis depending on the information available to the decision makers--two mixed programming problems and a minimax problem, which is proven to be reducible to a mixed programming one with all integer variables being Boolean--b) a standard software package for solving mixed programming problems, and c) software package for processing data. The results of testing the proposed tool on sets of model data taken from open sources are discussed.