A.A. Rassafi, M. Vaziri, and H. Poorzahedy
Sustainable development, sustainable transport, differential equa-tions, stability, chaos, bifurcation, sensitivity analysis, policy making
A new generation of sustainable development research uses mathematical models. This article proposes a heuristic approach to analyze sustainability in a society utilizing a mathematical model. First, an alternative definition of sustainable development has been proposed. Second, the interactions between transport and the other major components of a society have been simulated by a system of differential equations in the form of Lotka-Volterra type predator prey model. Some of the model parameters have been considered as control parameters in order to reflect the impact of strategies of reducing transport and economic levels of activities in favour of the environment on the one hand, and reducing the environmental impacts of economy and transport on the other hand. Third, sustainability in the national socioeconomic system, including transport, has been addressed by finding the feasible range for policy parameters by which the system is dynamically stable and non chaotic. The results confirm that a socioeconomic system without environmentally sound policies will be trapped in chaos in the long run.
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