The MOVES model, developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA), assesses emissions and energy use from on-road mobile sources and nonroad sources in the United States. Integrating high-resolution on-road vehicle activity data with appropriate MOVES emission rates facilitates the assessment of the environmental impacts of transportation design and operation strategies. However, the MOVES interface is complicated and the number of required individual model runs make it difficult to assess regional transportation networks and to undertake dynamic analyses of large-scale systems. In prior research efforts, this NCST research team developed MOVES-Matrix 2014b and MOVES-Matrix 3.0, by iterating the MOVES model through the comprehensive sets of potential input variables. Users can query energy use and emissions rates for any modeling scenario from the MOVES-Matrix 9-billion-cell matrix, without ever having to run the MOVES model. This allows analyses to execute about 200x faster than using MOVES directly.
In the first stage of MOVES-Matrix 4.0 development, the team will develop MOVES4 energy use and emission rates by running MOVES4 146,853 times on the clusters to populate matrices for Atlanta region model runs (combination of fuel specification and inspection and maintenance program). In this project, the team is adapting MOVES 4.0 for cross-platform use on PACE supercomputing clusters (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0, RHEL) without requiring root access by manually configuring MOVES 4.0 and its dependencies (e.g., MariaDB, Java, and Go) in a user-space, self-contained setup and extracted the emission and energy rate outputs of Atlanta, GA (Fulton County). As with prior versions of MOVES-Matrix, the team will perform a synthetic case study of these emission and energy use rates to verify that MOVES-Matrix replicates the exact same results as using MOVES directly (to ensure validity for use in regulatory analysis). In this first-year effort, the team will develop emission and energy use rate matrices to the state of Georgia, expanding to include Texas and Vermont in the fall.