Travel demand models (TDM) are developed by Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) for analyzing regional travel patterns but are often used to prepare activity inputs for use with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) MOtor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES) emissions model for air quality conformity analysis. This latter application requires modelers to either prepare multiple MOVES runs for various scenarios, or to develop their own pre- and post-processors for emission modeling. Both approaches involve a cumbersome and time consuming process.
To reduce these demands on modelers time, a tool that automates both the processing of TDM outputs and produces the same results as using MOVES is highly desirable. In this study, tool was developed to automatically link TDM outputs with MOVES-Matrix to provide emissions estimates at both the link and overall inventory level. MOVES-Matrix is an emissions modeling tool that operates by iteratively running MOVES across all possible combinations of vehicle source-type, fuel, meteorology, operating conditions, and other parameters to create a multi-dimensional emission rate lookup matrix (1) to produce must faster outputs at runtime.
The Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) TDM was used for this case study within metropolitan Atlanta area to demonstrate and validate the automated tool (2). For this purpose, conventional inventory-level emission modeling was first conducted using MOVES and these emission results were compared with results from the automated tool. Link-level emissions were similarly analyzed. The results indicate that the automated tool produces emission results very close to those using MOVES, while significantly reduce the running time. The tool can thus be beneficial to conformity analysis, as well as other environment applications, such as hot spot analysis and dispersion modeling.