Travel demand models (TDMs) are used to support state and regional transportation planning and policy decisions. TDMs were originally developed to forecast passenger traffic volumes with the primary objective of identifying investments to reduce traffic congestion. Today, TDMs are used to support a much broader range of purposes, including multimodal and freight transportation planning, demand management strategies, forecasting accessibility outcomes, evaluating network resiliency to disasters, and modeling air quality and public health impacts. However, the aggregate, trip based TDMs used by most regional and state transportation agencies lack the fidelity and sensitivity to evaluate contemporary planning and policy decisions. Activity based travel demand models (ABMs) offer substantial improvements and their agent-based simulation platforms allow for integration with a wide range of other agent-based modeling including land use simulation, vehicle adoption, population growth simulation models among others. Despite their advantages, the complexity of ABMs has constrained their adoption to all but the largest metropolitan areas, often with support from academic researchers. Smaller urban areas and rural states like Vermont could benefit substantially from adopting ABMs. The goal of this project is to implement an open source and/or free for public use ABM in Vermont. Several ABMs meeting these criteria have been developed by US Department of Energy labs. This project will implement a modeling platform that University of Vermont can use in partnership with regional and state stakeholders to advance rural transportation planning and policy research; perform a case study to demonstrate the unique capabilities of ABMs to inform current transportation policy debates in Vermont; identify implementation barriers; and identify future research directions to address implementation barriers to enable wider ABM adoption outside of large urban areas.