Ongoing Projects

Using Twin Cities Destinations and their Accessibility as a Multimodal Planning ToolMnDOT
Cost: 100,000. Time: Sixteen months.

The research aims to envision the future of accessibility in the Twin Cities region for a variety of different urban development and transportation planning scenarios, including a trend and alternative scenarios. This will be done in several parts. First, forecasted population, employment, and other growth indicators will be collected. Second, a variety of scenarios will be developed to address growth trends and tradeoffs as well as provide estimated answers to “what if” questions about alternative land use, network, and transportation pricing configurations. A set of accessibility indicators will be calculated for each of the developed planning scenarios.

Consumer travel behavior and retail geography: A microscopic investigation using GPS data and parcel-level land use SLPP TechPlan
Cost: $84,105. Time: One Year.

This research aims to link individuals' detailed travel behavior and the nature of the retail environment for the first time. To this end, we propose this research to understand the relationship between microscopic retail geography and consumer travel behavior, and its environmental footprint using GPS-based travel data. Our research will study how retail clusters affect shopping in the Twin Cities, and how consumers' shopping behavior influence retail location choice through empirical studies and theoretical modeling. This research will fill two research niches in retail geography and travel behavior studies. First, by explicitly tackling business interactions on supply chains, we employ the agent-based approach to explain the emergence of retail clusters from a microscopic perspective. Second, using GPS logs of individuals' daily travel data we are capable of identifying the connection between complex daily shopping trips (such as trip chaining) and retail locations: whether retail clusters induce or reduce travel demand, and whether trip chaining drives the emergence of clustering. This research could not be undertaken without the GPS data collection infrastructure that ITS enables.

STREET: Simulating Transportation for Realistic Engineering and Education. National Science Foundation
Cost: $500,000. Time: Four years.

Currently, most undergraduate transportation engineering courses are offered in a traditional combination of “chalk and talk” lectures and “paper and pencil” problem-solving exercises, failing to fully motivate students and preventing them from effectively assimilating and applying knowledge in their future work. This approach to education does not expose undergraduate students to the myriad of challenging issues and solution methods that would encourage them to pursue careers in transportation engineering. A new paradigm for transportation engineering education is needed to better engage students and deliver knowledge. Although simulation has been proven to be powerful tool to encourage active learning, the effectiveness of simulation has not been fully examined in transportation education practice, and its potential advantages over traditional ways of learning have not been widely acknowledged. The focus of this proposal is to develop and refine a suite of web-based simulation modules that can be easily incorporated in the undergraduate transportation courses. These simulation modules will be also evaluated in a diverse setting and improved after examining evaluation results. Eventually, the simulation-based teaching materials will become an active textbook, which offers an interactive learning environment to undergraduate students. The active textbook with simulation is expected to improve student understanding of critical concepts in Transportation Engineering and student motivation toward Transportation Engineering and improve student retention in the field. Specifically, targeting the required undergraduate course Introduction to Transportation Engineering, five simulation programs are in the development plan, namely, ROAD: Roadway Online Application for Design, OASIS: Online Application of Signalized Intersection Simulation, SOFT: Simulation of Freeway Traffic, ADAM: Agent-based Demand and Assignment Model, and SONG: Simulator of Network Growth. Prototypes of these simulation programs have been developed (including ROAD, ADAM and SONG) or currently being developed (including OASIS and SOFT) through the PIs’ accumulated works over the last several years. Initial evaluation and testing including the prototypes of ROAD, ADAM and SONG have been conducted in the course offerings at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities (UMN). The preliminary evaluation results are very positive and encourage us to pursue further. This project will further develop and refine the five simulation modules and integrate them into the undergraduate courses at UMN. Building upon the local implementation success, the simulation modules will be evaluated and tested in the course offerings of over sixteen other transportation programs from different universities across the country. Feedback from the implementation will be provided to the project team for continuing improvement. In addition, to reach an even broader audience with computer simulation, a mobile booth with public-oriented versions of some of the simulation modules will be displayed at the annual Minnesota State Fair and the Minnesota Transportation Museum for public demonstration and education on current transportation problems.