Transhipment Model and Transport Planning

The title of the article includes 'transport planning, and there is, in the first paragraph, reference to the model's usefulness in preparing a "systematic transport plan" (although this is never defined). Yet the results of the study show, in general, extremely wide divergence between actual and optimal commodity flows (pp. 454 ff). That is, the linear programme solution did not "predict" the actual flows at all well for the five commodities studied. This is hardly surprising, since Parikh has given us no evidence about the structure of these industries or the regulation (if any) to which they might "be subject to indicate why we should expect anything like optimal behaviour from them. In addition, there are brief remarks on the impossibility of having some of the necessary data for future years (p. 458-459). Thus the model predicts already observed phenomena poorly and requires, for prediction into the future, unavailable data.