Journal of Emerging Trends in Economics and Management Sciences: Home

Abstract:
For a developing country like Nigeria, the main issue in transportation is the problem of logistic resulting in large crowed of stranded passengers in motor packs and bus terminals. This problem is as a result of depending too much on conventional wisdom, instead of tested scientific and empirical methods in planning for the future. An example is the case of Cross line Limited, a transport company owned by the Cross river state government in Nigeria. Cross Line Limited has logistic problems due to factors mentioned above and has resulted to passenger frustrations in most of its forty one approved routes. These routes effectively cover all parts of cross River State and all state capitals as well as Abuja, the Nation?s Capital. Therefore the effects of poor logistic in the socio-economic development of Cross River State can better be imagined. The thrust of this work is therefore to determining appropriate SARIMA model that can adequately predict passenger traffic as an empirical tool for logistic planning. We collected passenger data from Cross Line Limited and used the visualization tools of ACF and PACF complemented by model selection criterion of AIC and BIC to identify SARIMA (1, 1, 0)*(1, 0, 1) as an appropriate model for predicting future volume of passenger traffic. Forecast generated using this model captured the major characteristic of the original data. If adopted and properly used, this model will help Cross Line management in logistic planning for the future and hence help in decongesting passengers in motor packs and bus terminals.

Keywords: ACF. PACF, AIC, BIC, ARIMA, SARIMA.

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