Estimating the Needed Volume of Investment in a Public–Private Partnership to Develop a Regional Energy/Freight Transportation Infrastructure

A decision-support tool for estimating the volume of investment in developing a regional energy/freight transportation infrastructure is proposed. The tool provides the estimates of the required investment volume and those of the expected amount of revenue that the infrastructure functioning may generate. These estimates are key ones in negotiations with private investors on forming a potential public–private partnership to finance the infrastructure development. The tool includes (a) a mathematical model underlying the formulations of three optimization problems 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) a software package for processing data. The results of testing the proposed tool on sets of model data taken from open sources are discussed.