The MOVES model, developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA), produces fuel use rates for use at almost any scale from on-road mobile sources and nonroad sources in the United States. Integrating high-resolution on-road vehicle activity data with appropriate MOVES fuel use rates supports robust assessment of transportation operations and planning strategies related to economic savings associated with congestion reduction. 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, MOVES-Matrix 3.0, and MOVES-Matrix 4.0, by iterating the MOVES model through the comprehensive sets of potential input variables. Users can query fuel use and running mass rates for any modeling scenario from the MOVES-Matrix 9-billion-cell matrix, without ever having to run the MOVES model. This allows analysts to perform modeling runs about 200x faster than using MOVES directly (and there is no longer a need to develop MOVES input files for any scenario analysis, saving additional time and resources).
In the first stage of MOVES-Matrix 5.0 development, the team will develop MOVES 5.0 fuel use and running mass rates by performing 146,853 MOVES 5.0 model runs (across all input variable combinations) on a supercomputing cluster and will populate matrices for Atlanta (Fulton County, Georgia), for the Fulton County fuel specification and inspection and maintenance program settings. In this project, the team is adapting MOVES 5.0 for cross-platform use on PACE supercomputing clusters (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, RHEL9) without requiring root access by manually configuring MOVES 5.0 and its dependencies (e.g., MariaDB, Java, and Go) in a user-space, self-contained setup and extracted the pollutant and energy rate outputs of Atlanta, Georgia (Fulton County). As with prior versions of MOVES-Matrix, the team will perform synthetic case studies 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 matrices will be developed for the state of Georgia, with planned expansion to Texas and Vermont in the second half of the project.