The 2008 research into Transportation Infrastructure in Alabama had two main focal points; the creation of the Freight Planning Framework, with particular emphasis on the disaggregation and use of national level freight data at the state and local level, and the refinement and continued development of the Alabama Transportation Infrastructure Model (ATIM) for analysis and communication of transportation infrastructure issues. Additional findings of significant interest were insights into freight planning and modeling of operations at ports of entry. Specific tasks included:
- Development of the Freight Planning Framework which has a foundation in the use of industry sectors to focus the understanding and analysis of the economic factors in an area to allow knowledgeable and informed decisions on transportation infrastructure issues. The concept behind this approach is that if the underlying principles of freight demand generation can be discovered for a particular industry, the ability to accurately predict infrastructure requirements due to the need to access the freight transportation system is enhanced. Once the freight generation principles of an industry is determined, it is theoretically possible to apply those principles anywhere the industry exists to estimate the demand for freight system requirements.
- Expansion and Enhancement of the Alabama Transportation Infrastructure Model (ATIM). Among the significant strides made to the ATIM were the development of performance measures, time of day procedures, and an interface to link directly to a travel demand model to generate traffic volumes. This interface eased the ability of the model to run various growth scenarios to assess when congestion would occur on the local infrastructure. In addition to these enhancements, the research team has completed the initial stages of a new version of the ATIM that is an agent-based model constructed on a Java platform. The new Java version will overcome many of the deficiencies of the former model.
- Modeling Intermodal Operations Using Discrete Event Simulations which included a conceptual framework for simulating seaport terminals such as the coal and container terminals at the Port of Mobile. This task also included modeling disruptions caused by container inspections at an intermodal terminal.
- Continuous Improvement in Logistics and Transportation Systems. This task detailed continuous improvements at the Port of Mobile including Lean Enterprise Implementation, Value Stream Mapping and the development of Lean Implementation tools for Seaports.