Case Study of MOVES Travel Demand Model Post Processors

摘要

MOVES (Motor Vehicle Emission Simulator) is an emission model developed by Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) to estimate emissions from mobile sources on a national, state and project levels. For regional emission inventories, usually done for the metropolitan planning organizations (MPO), outputs from travel demand model (TDM) are combined with the MOVES emissions. TDM outputs, such as link vehicle miles travelled (VMT) by speed and user class, the key components to calculate emission inventories, are grouped together with emission rates for each link. MOVES is a very complex model with long running time. It also takes certain programming skills to extract the required information from large MOVES database outputs. It may not be practical to run MOVES every time TDM is run. As a result, it is preferred to run MOVES once to generate MPO-specific emission rate look-up tables which are used to calculate emissions with every TDM run. This paper briefly describes efforts by New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC), New Orleans MPO and Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) to integrate travel demand models with MOVES. Parsons Brinckerhoff developed an interface (AQuaVis-MOVES) using this approach to couple together travel demand model (in TransCAD) for New Orleans Regional Commission (NORPC) and MOVES look-up tables from runs for counties in the model area. The AQuaVis-MOVES program is written in Java and uses GISDK scripts to convert the outputs from travel demand model to generic AQuaVis tables that have forecasted link volumes and link speeds. NYMTC developed a web application system on the internal server that enables user to invoke MOVES application on the local machine and generate emission rate files, which are then uploaded on to the server, along with VMT generated from Best Practice Model run and emission inventories are obtained by the internal post processing scripts. FDOT District 4, developed emission inventories at county level using HEVAL module of Southeast Florida Regional Planning Model (SERPM). VMT, volumes by facility type and area type, ramp fractions were obtained from Highway evaluation (HEVAL) reports, after the model run. They were combined with MOVES county-level emission rates under several alternatives to come up with the total regional emissions. This paper will present the details of the approach in each project.