Co-Principal Investigators Mike Goodchild and Rick Church have landed a $2.5m grant (of which $1m is cost shared) from the Department of Transportation–Research and Innovative Technology Administration. The 2-year project is titled “MeTrIS: Metropolitan Transportation Information System Applying Space Based Technologies for Freight Congestion Mitigation.” The Project Director, Val Noronha (Digital Geographic Research Corporation; pictured at the right) summarizes the new project as follows:
With more than 30% of the nation’s containerized imports being trucked over I-710 from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach , we have a logistical and security vulnerability of enormous proportions. To manage that, for a start we need to know what goods are going to which warehouses and transshipment points, by what routes, at what times of day, where the congestion points are, when they form, when they dissolve, and how truckers detour around them. This is why we created MeTrIS.
MeTrIS envisages extensive tracking of transportation assets in a metropolitan area using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Vehicle-Infrastructure Integration (VII) technologies. Vehicles report their location and attributes in real time. Sensors in infrastructure might simultaneously report environmental conditions such as bridge ice or fog. This rich data stream enables a variety of analyses and models.
More than half of all drayage trips in the port area don’t move goods, just empty containers and chassis. Our goal is to achieve a 10% reduction in truck traffic by rationalizing these trips using optimization and microsimulation models. Easing traffic will incidentally help air quality and perhaps address some social issues. In addition to UCSB and DGRC, the consortium includes the University of Washington, Airsis Inc., the California Marine & Intermodal Transportation System Advisory Council (CALMITSAC), and Transport Express. The California Department of Transportation, Los Angeles Department of Transportation, Port of Long Beach, TeleAtlas North America Inc., APL Limited, and Digital Globe are additional cost sharing participants. UCSB is one of seven national consortia in the current DOT remote sensing program. An earlier award in 2000 set up the National Consortium for Remote Sensing in Transportation (NCRST) in Infrastructure Management. The project web site is www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/ncrst.
