My research interests focus on the development of integrated land-use/transportation projects and their application in urban and regional planning. This section lists the most relevant research projects I am currently working on.

Developing Sustainable Regional Strategies

Funded through SESYNC by the National Science Foundation, I am leading a research project to develop strategies that support sustainable regional development. With a team of eight researchers, several models are integrated to test policies on their impact on sustainability, including models that cover land use, transportation, environmental impacts, land cover and climate change. In the course of this two-year project, four workshops with international experts in model integration will be held to develop novel strategies of model integration. As a testbed, this project links with the PRESTO! project that aims at developing a sustainable development strategy for the Baltimore-Washington region. Is is expected that through advanced model integration, this project will be able to develop and test stustainability strategies that cannot be analyzed with individual models alone.

SILO: Simple Integrated Land-Use Orchestrator

SILO is a new land-use model that is designed as a discrete choice microsimulation model. Discrete choice means that decisions (such as a decision of a household to move to a new dwelling) are modeled explicitly based on utilities at the current dwelling location and expected utilities at alternative dwelling locations. Being a microsimulation model, every household and person is simulated individually. SILO models household relocation, non-spatial demographic changes (such as birth, aging, marriage or having children), developers' decisions to build new residential buildings and changes to dwellings over time (including renovation, deterioration and demolition).

SILO is built as a middle-weight tool. It is fully integrated with a travel demand model, and therefore, more complex than sketch-planning tools (such as CommunityViz or UPlan). On the other hand, it is built to function with less rigorous data collection and estimation requirements, making SILO simpler to implement than traditional large-scale land-use models (such as PECAS or UrbanSim).

SILO is an open-source software and was initially developed with funding by Parsons Brinckerhoff. The prototype application was implemented for the Metropolitan Area of Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. Currently, I am working as the Principal Investigator on an updated version is implemented for the State of Maryland, funded by the Maryland Department of Transportation. I have designed and implemented this model from scratch. The SILO website provides further information.


MSTM: Maryland Statewide Transportation Model

The Maryland Statewide Transportation Model (MSTM) is an advanced trip-based model that covers the State of Maryland plus surrounding areas at the statewide layer and the remainder of North America at the regional layer. Since 2006, the Maryland State Highway Administration (SHA) has developed the MSTM with support from the National Center for Smart Growth (NCSG) at the University of Maryland and Parsons Brinckerhoff. MSTM is a multi-level model that covers local trips and long-distance trips as well as person travel and freight. It has become a policy decision support tool that is applied extensively for scenario analysis, corridor studies, project forecasts and future transportation performance measurement.

The MSTM is designed as a multi-level model that currently works at two geographies. The statewide level covers not only the State of Maryland but also surrounding areas, including Washington, D.C., Delaware, and parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. The national layer covers the continental North America, including Canada and Mexico. This national layer accounts for all long-distance trips. A more detailed description of the MSTM can be found on tfresource.

I have worked on most modules of the MSTM, some of which I designed from scratch. As the Principal Investigator, I am currently revising the model to work from a Synthetic Population that has been created with SILO, and on integrating the MSTM with an auto-ownership model.


Redefining Spatial Resolution in Modeling

Travel demand models use zones as origins and destinations of trips. Commonly, such zones are derived from census tracts or other spatial definitions of neighborhoods. Urban zones are smaller and rural zones are larger, but consistency in spatial resolution across the study area is rarely achieved. Creating a new zone system is a manual and laborious effort, and therefore, rarely undertaken.

Raster cells in Georgia: Atlanta to Chattanooga