Development of an activity allocation model for Sri Lanka using PECAS framework

Abstract

Traditional Transport Models can under or overestimate the benefits when they try to model a rapidly changing economic surrounding. While looking in to transport aspects, they cannot account the changes, the transportation causes on other systems, which ultimately act upon transportation itself. With expanding economic activities, the rapid urbanization, urban sprawl, planned developments, government policies, the traditional transportation modelling efforts in Sri Lanka is now challenged. Even though some efforts were taken for a better approach, a complete model is yet to be developed, which can grasp the integrated nature of land use and transportation. Even though the land use transport integration is a complex process to model, PECAS (Production, Exchange, Consumption Allocation System), a generalized theoretical framework for representing spatial economic systems, is capable of modelling it efficiently due to its intrinsic capabilities of modelling all economic subsystems with acceptable accuracy levels. It generates the demand for land, products and services. While the use of PECAS is widely tested in developed countries, only limited studies have been carried out to identify the importance of having a model for developing countries. Thus, the study focused on developing one of the major components of the framework, an Activity Allocation Module. First, study checked the possibility of adopting the PECAS framework for Sri Lanka, identified data to be derived and did necessary processing. Data gathered from national accounts of Sri Lanka, input output tables, supply and use tables, other surveys conducted by Department of Census and Statistics and data from other sources were assessed, to check the suitability of available data to prepare economic and land use inputs to the model. Development of key elements of an Activity Allocation Model were completed with available and synthesized data. As the basic output of the study, an Aggregate Economic Flow Table was developed with 42 commodity categories (17 good categories, 11 service commodities, 11 labour categories, 3 space categories and 8 financial and adjusting categories), 12 manufacturing activities and 11 service activities. It includes government and 3 categories of households. Import and export markets are also accounted.