Value chains of Road Freight Transport operations: An agent-based modelling proposal

Freight transport operations generate information flows and cause the creation of value by the agents that take part in them. These processes precede the flow of goods and continue until the end of the operation. The article proposes the design of an agent-based model with the structure of a directed graph to simulate the diffusion of information through it. The model considers the existence of five types of agents, three of them related to the transport activity and two external to it, all of them geographically located and interrelated by a certain distance. The goal of the model is to simulate the transfer of information between road freight transport agents through their operational decision making, in order to understand the behaviour of the variables that intervene in them and to assess the needed conditions for the successfully develop of the operation. This is a first step in the theoretical construction of the model, consequently provisional results have been omitted in this article.