Developing Freight Analysis Zones at a State Level: A Cluster Analysis Approach

The ability to plan and forecast freight demand to support transportation infrastructure investment decisions is limited by the lack of available data at a level of detail that is meaningful to the transportation planner.  This paper develops an initial methodology...

Modular Approach for Rapidly Developing Simulation Models for Analyzing and Evaluating Port Operations

This paper presents a modular approach for rapidly developing simulation models that can analyze and evaluate existing port operations, changes and expansions. Simulation is an inexpensive insurance against costly mistakes involving capital expenditures, but many...

Transportation Infrastructure in Alabama: Finding and Filling the Holes

This research built upon previous work on the development of tools to bridge the gaps in the analysis and understanding of the relationships between economic growth and transportation infrastructure in Alabama. The tasks performed under this contract included:...

Using FAF2 Port Data to Model Freight in a Medium Sized Port City

The ability to accurately incorporate freight moving to and from a port into an urban model is difficult in both small and large cities.  To address this issue, this paper presents an application in which the Freight Analysis Framework Version 2.2 (FAF2) Port Data was...

Issues and Approaches to the Utilization of Highly Aggregated Databases in Freight Planning and Modeling

As one of the four original pilot studies into disaggregation of the Freight Analysis Framework Version 2 program funded by the Federal Highway Administration, the research team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAHuntsville) has experienced many of the...

Developing Validated Freight Transportation Models Utilizing Highly Aggregated Data

It is commonly accepted in the transportation planning community that local data is the only legitimate data that can be used to forecast travel.  Therefore, large, highly aggregated data sets are often discredited and deemed an inappropriate data source without...