The implications of major investments in transportation infrastructure and services require careful evaluation in order to assess the true benefits and costs of initiating specific regional development policies. Whether applied locally, regionally, or nationally, effective decision-making begins with sound estimates of the current and future demand for such facilities and services. This includes the estimation of trip purpose and land use-specific passenger and freight trip frequencies, origin-to-destination trip volumes, facility specific travel costs, and their associated levels of traffic congestion. ORNL has extensive expertise in developing and applying spatial decision support systems to such traffic forecasting and associated infrastructure investment studies. This expertise spans and often combines statistical and econometric modeling with micro-simulation and optimization methods, and has been applied across all of the major modes of transportation (highway, rail, water, air, pipeline, intermodal), and at the local and large regional as well as fully national scale. This includes traditional transportation planning studies as well more specialized uses of similar methods and models, notably in regional evacuation studies, hazardous materials routing studies, and in critical link analysis studies in support of threat mitigation and other network security objectives. Recent projects have made contributions to the development and application of more accurate and comprehensive benefit-cost analysis frameworks, and to the study of traffic congestion, notably around major intermodal passenger and freight terminals. In support of these generally applied studies recent theoretical research has focused on developing new methods for tracing domestic and international freight movements through complete product supply chains. ORNL has also been a national leader over the past three decades in developing, adapting, applying and disseminating a set of national and North American multimodal transportation network databases. Use in made of the latest GIS tools in developing decision support software.
Focus
Areas:
Recent
Work (in 2002) Projects
for the Federal Highway Administration, 2002: Projects
for the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 2002 Projects
for the Tennessee Department of Transportation (Office of Public
Transportation): National
Science Foundation Project:
Some
R&D Software Products (and principal sponsoring agency): |