Professor Kostas Goulias provided the following press release:
GeoTrans has signed a contract of approximately $1,040,000 to develop the Simulator of Activities, Greenhouse Emissions, Networks, and Travel (SimAGENT). Kostas Goulias (the project director), in partnership with Dr. Chandra Bhat (Adnan Abou-Ayyash Centennial Professor in Transportation Engineering) from the University of Texas, Austin, and Dr. Ram Pendyala from the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University, created a vision of a travel demand forecasting system that will be developed for the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) in the next 27 months in two phases.
This new model system merges three model building traditions in the three participating universities to use synthetic population generation and dynamic evolution to create synthetic schedules of activities and travel for the approximately 19 million residents of the SCAG region. In the first phase, model components developed for Dallas Fort-Worth are transferred to California and tested extensively to provide a first approximation of green house gas emissions and impacts of land use policies. In the second phase, a new model system is created that is tailored to the region and has an expanded repertory of policies. The model developers expect the model to have an unprecedented spatial, temporal, and social resolution and to account for human interactions that were never taken into account in past applications for travel demand forecasting. This brings Southern California to the forefront of transportation modeling and simulation. This project is also a unique opportunity for our students to gain knowledge, skills, and experience with policy issues and modeling techniques that redefine the state-of-the-practice and are used for major investments under the pioneering, “green” legislative agenda of California.
SCAG is the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for Imperial, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties. The Region encompasses a population of more than 19 million people in an area exceeding 38,000 square miles. As the designated Metropolitan Planning Organization, SCAG is mandated by the federal government to research and draw up plans for transportation, growth management, hazardous waste management, and air quality. SCAG collaborates with the California Department of Transportation, county transportation commissions, and other agencies in the Region that perform transportation planning and analyses. SCAG, since 1967, is also the primary agency responsible for the development and maintenance of travel demand forecasting models for the Region. These models provide quantitative analysis for the Regional Transportation Plan (RTP), the Regional Transportation Improvement Program (RTIP), and the Air Quality Management Plan (AQMP). The Regional Model, updated from each cycle of the RTP, is also used to evaluate other transportation projects within the Region. The Regional Model is typically updated and validated for each cycle of the RTP. In this cycle, model improvements are motivated by the California Senate Bill No. 375 that mandates travel demand models to be used by MPOs to develop RTPs that must assess the effects of land use decisions, transit service, and economic incentives.
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