Research Grants
Investigation of E-Commerce Enabled Freight Demand
PI: Xia Jin
Funding Agency: Florida Department of Transportation
Award Amount: $251,734
Award Duration: 2020- 2021
Description:
The rise of e-commerce and rapid development in user centric on-demand deliveries have changed the way people shop and receive goods. These societal trends and technological advancements are also reshaping the supply-chain and logistics industry. This research aims to incorporate household freight trip attractions into the freight demand analysis framework and addressing the impacts of e-commerce on travel demand and the highway network.
Evaluation and Enhancement of the Florida Statewide Model
PI: Xia Jin
Funding Agency: Florida Department of Transportation
Award Amount: $152,197
Award Duration: 2020- 2021
Description:
Statewide travel demand models are essential tools to support planning and programming activities at the state and regional level. Statewide modeling is used to help formulate transportation plans and policies, evaluate and prioritize projects and programs, and assess the economic and social impacts of major transportation investments. this project aims to develop a road-map for future model enhancements of the FLSWM in light of emerging planning issues, and propose enhancement strategies incorporating advanced demand modeling techniques.
Emerging Mobility Services for the Transportation Disadvantaged
PI: Eleni Bardaka (NCSU), Xia Jin, Noreen McDonald (UNC-Chapel HIll), Ruth Steiner (UF), Jeffrey LaMondia (AU)
Funding Agency: The Southeast Transportation Research, Innovation, Development, and Education Center (STRIDE), Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT)
Award Amount: $50,000 (project total $440,000)
Award Duration: 2019- 2020
Description:
The overall objective of the proposed project is to provide recommendations and tools that address the mobility needs of transportation disadvantaged populations to transportation agencies and other stakeholders by taking advantage of the recent technological advancements in mobility services. The project is a collaboration among five universities in the STRIDE partnership which will address this overall objective from different social angles and accessibility considerations.
Assessing the Health Impacts of Transportation Projects: Synthesis and Framework Development
PI: Xia Jin, Ming Lee
Funding Agency: Florida Department of Transportation
Award Amount: $99,172
Award Duration: 2020- 2020
Description:
Transportation projects can have tremendous impacts on the health of the general public through their positive and/or negative effects on physical activity, air quality, and traffic crashes. Recognizing the needs to help the agency identify and evaluate projects that achieve a balance between economic development and public health, this project aims to provide a comprehensive synthesis of existing knowledge and experience in health impact assessment (HIA) methods as well as tool applications. This work lays the foundation for future development of HIA methods or tools that may help the FDOT incorporate health considerations into the planning process.
A synthesis on Data Mining Methods and Applications for Automated Fare Collection (AFC) Data
PI: Xia Jin, Fabian Cevallos
Funding Agency: Florida Department of Transportation
Award Amount: $69,952
Award Duration: 2020- 2020
Description:
Automated fare collection (AFC) systems, also referred to as smart cards, have been widely adopted by transit agencies around the world. While providing time savings, convenience and other advantages in revenue collection, they also produce massive, continuous and anonymized digital records of onboard transactions. This project aims to provide a comprehensive review of existing knowledge and experience in utilizing AFC data, from both practice and research perspectives. From practice perspective, we are interested to know whether and how transit or planning agencies have utilized AFC data to support planning and operation activities. From research perspective, innovative data collection and analysis methods and applications will be summarized.
The Impacts of Emerging Mobility Options and Vehicle Technologies on Travel Behavior
PI: Xia Jin
Funding Agency: Florida Department of Transportation
Award Amount: $187,990
Award Duration: 2018- 2020
Description:
Emerging mobility options and automated (self-driving) vehicle technologies hold the promise to transform the ways we live and travel. It is essential to incorporate ridesourcing and AV considerations into current long-range transportation planning efforts, which usually extends to the next 20 to 30 years. Built upon understanding of the potential market of emerging mobility options derived through the first phase of the study, the primary goal for the second phase of this research effort is to further investigate the influential factors of people’s mode choice behavior facing emerging mobility options. The project aims to provide an approach to understand the likelihood and magnitude of behavior shifts towards shared mobility, given considerations of major underlying forces, such as pricing, demographics, habitual behavior, perceptions, and attitudes. Recommendations will be given on scenario designs to reflect anticipated behavioral shifts in responding to these emerging mobility options in the travel demand forecasting framework.
Identifying and Tracking Emerging Transportation Trends
PI: Xia Jin
Funding Agency: Florida Department of Transportation
Award Amount: $148,395
Award Duration: 2019- 2020
Description:
The landscape of transportation, for both passenger and freight, has been changing at an unprecedented speed. The change has been driven by multiple external factors including rapid advancement of new technologies, shifts in the economy from goods to services, evolving traveler behavior and lifestyle preferences, changing social-demographics of the society, and gradual change of environmental factors. How these changes will affect transportation demand in both the near term and the long term are not entirely clear. This project aims to develop a better understanding of these external factors, trends, their interplay, and how they may impact future transportation demand.
Discovering Potential Market for the Integration of Public Transportation and Emerging Shared-Mobility Services.
PI: Lili Du (UF), Xia Jin
Funding Agency: The Southeast Transportation Research, Innovation, Development, and Education Center (STRIDE), Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT)
Award Amount: $49,560 (project total $124,268)
Award Duration: 2018- 2020
Description:
In recent years, the advance of communication and information technology enables travelers to conveniently request, track and pay for trip via mobile devices. This significant convenience promotes the emerging travel modes such as shared-mobility service including carsharing, bikesharing, ridesourcing (like Uber and Lyft), and private shuttles (like Bay-Area tech shuttles), etc. This research seeks to discover the potential market from both demand and supply sides for the integration of public transit and emerging shared-mobility services. Mainly we would like to answer two questions. Who are the potential demand with high potential to use this inter-modal services? Where and when are the supply gap/hubs to integrate this emerging mobility and public transit services?
Incorporating Reliability Measures into the Freight Project Prioritization Decision Support System
PI: Xia Jin
Funding Agency: Florida Department of Transportation
Award Amount: $250,000
Award Duration: 2018- 2020
Description:
Freight has long been a driving force for the prosperity of Florida’s economy. Given increasing freight mobility needs and limited funding, there is a pressing need to prioritize public investments in freight systems with comprehensive and quantitative methods to analyze freight benefits of proposed projects. This project aims to address this need by proposing an approach to incorporating reliability measures into project prioritization and developing a decision-support system to facilitate the process. The following objectives are developed for this research project: 1) Develop the methodology to quantify reliability benefits associated with proposed highway and multimodal system improvements; 2) Develop a data-driven freight project prioritization framework, with considerations of reliability measures; and 3) Develop a decision support system with geographic mapping tools to facilitate freight project prioritization process.
Large Truck Crash Analysis for Freight Mobility and Safety Enhancement in Florida
PI: Xia Jin, Ilir Bejleri (UF)
Funding Agency: Florida Department of Transportation
Award Amount: $250,000
Award Duration: 2017- 2019
Description:
Truck movement plays a vital role in fueling the nation’s economic prosperity and the well-being of all Americans. Crashes involving freight mobility imposes enormous costs on society. The primary goal of this study is to enhance freight mobility by removing crashes as an inhibitor so transportation safety and economic viability are improved in Florida. This research aims at: 1) conduct a statewide crash analysis focusing on crashes involving large trucks in the past ten years, and investigate the impacts, occurrences and severity of crashes involving freight mobility; 2) develop practical countermeasures to reduce crashes involving freight mobility, and recommend engineering, education, enforcement, and emergency response strategies to offset impacts of crashes on productivity loss and operation costs while enhancing freight mobility safety; and 3) recommend a better economic appraisal approach that accounts for the impacts of freight incidents on the economic viability.
Potential Implications of Automated Vehicles on Travel Behavior
PI: Xia Jin
Funding Agency: Florida Department of Transportation
Award Amount: $100,000
Award Duration: 2016- 2018
Description:
Emerging mobility options and automated (self-driving) vehicle technologies hold the promise to transform the ways we live and travel. Various technologies are already being implemented or undergoing testing, and several states have passed legislation allowing these vehicles to travel on public roadways. Yet, much remains to be explored regarding the various ways in which these emerging technologies could reshape our lifestyles. This research aims to obtain new insights in peoples mobility decisions in light of shared mobility options and AV technologies through a carefully designed choice experiment environment that allows the analyst to quantify the behavioral changes and assess the impacts of influential factors on mobility decisions. A nationwide survey will be designed and implemented to gather information from travelers across the country on their existing mobility patterns, attitudes and perceptions regarding mobility options, and stated preference choices in various scenarios.
Methodology for Transit Ridership Forecasting – Incorporating Transit Service Decisions in Managed Lane Programs
PI: Xia Jin
Funding Agency: Florida Department of Transportation
Award Amount: $159,720.27
Award Duration: 2016- 2018
Description:
Managed Lanes provide travel time savings and travel time reliability improvements to the users. They also bring new opportunities for transit service making it a viable choice by providing the express lane benefits without additional costs to the passengers. Although transit has not been the primary focus for ML programs, given the significant benefits that transit service could bring in contributing to the overall project goals in reducing congestion, enhancing system performance, improving environmental, economic and social concerns, there is a need for a standard approach that enables the incorporation of transit service goals and benefit considerations into ML programs. This research aims to equip the agencies with better tools and methods to facilitate the assessment of investment decisions for transit services to be provided in conjunction with ML projects, and to maximize project benefits and system efficiency through both highway and transit alternatives.
New York Best Practice Model 2012 Base Year Update
PI: Xia Jin
Funding Agency: New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC), subcontract from Cambridge Systematics
Award Amount: $16,400
Award Duration: 2016 -2020
Description:
Provide modeling expertise in the enhancement and assessment of the activity-based model for the New York Metropolitan area.
Examining the Value of Travel Time Reliability for Freight Transportation to Support Freight Planning and Decision-Making
PI: Xia Jin
Funding Agency: Florida Department of Transportation, the National Center for Transportation System Productivity and Management (NCTSPM), Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT)
Award Amount: $230,696
Award Duration: 2014- 2016
Description:
Freight is the economy in motion. The efficient flow of freight is essential for the competitiveness of U.S. industries in the global economy. The performance of the freight transportation system also has direct implications on the standard of living, and the social and environmental goals of the communities. The goal of this research is to fill the knowledge gap in understanding the value of reliability in freight transportation to support freight policy and investment decisions. The specific objectives of the study include: 1) synthesize existing studies on the value of reliability, focusing on freight movement, and identify knowledge and data gap; 2) conduct stated preference survey among freight system users to understand their transportation choice decision-making; 3) develop econometric models to estimate value of reliability by stratification, such as, commodity type, trip length, and business type, etc.; and 4) recommend a framework in incorporating the value of reliability in freight analysis and project evaluation.
A synthesis of the “State-of-the-Practice for Advancing Planning and Operations Integration Opportunities within Transportation Agencies”
PI: Xia Jin
Funding Agency: Florida Department of Transportation
Award Amount: $40,000
Award Duration: 2014- 2014
Description:
Integrating planning and operations efforts ensure that transportation investment decisions reflect full consideration of all available strategies and approaches. It fosters an environment to support the analysis of safety, mobility, reliability, and security of transportation systems that are otherwise difficult to address in a traditional setting. This research aims at collecting relevant materials on planning and operations integration and provide a synthesis on current state of knowledge and practice in this area; and identifying key elements in linking planning and operations, as well as potential knowledge gaps, limitations, and challenges of existing practices and approaches. Findings and specific recommendations of this research effort will serve as input for the development of the framework for integrating planning and operations.
Investigating Value of Time and Value of Reliability for Managed Lanes
PI: Xia Jin
Funding Agency: Florida Department of Transportation
Award Amount: $150,000
Award Duration: 2014- 2015
Description:
Managed lanes (MLs) refer to the application of various operational and design strategies on highway facilities to improve system efficiency and mobility by proactively allocating traffic capacity to different lanes. With increasing emphasis on ML strategies in the nation, it is critical to understand the behavior changes and underlying causalities in responding to MLs, in order to evaluate the program impacts and effectiveness especially when facing demand and other system changes. This research aims to quantify value of time (VOT) and value of reliability (VOR) indicators that contribute to the willingness to pay in responding to MLs; examine how the impacts of MLs differ among users and under various circumstances in order to address user heterogeneity; and recommend approaches to derive VOT and VOR values for incorporation into the travel demand modeling framework.
Regional Establishment Survey
PI: Xia Jin
Funding Agency: New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC) (subcontract from Cambridge Systematics)
Award Amount: $25,296
Award Duration: 2014- 2017
Description:
Develop survey expansion procedures and produce weighting factors for the core establishment survey and hotel survey for the New York metropolitan region.
Towards a Holistic Understanding of Quality of Life: An Analysis of Activity-Travel Patterns on Non- Mid-week Day
PIs: Siva Srinivasan (UF), Xia Jin
Funding Agency: The Southeast Transportation Research, Innovation, Development, and Education Center (STRIDE), Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT)
Award Amount: $37,977 (project total $77,790)
Award Duration: 2012- 2014
Description:
The intent of this study is to examine the activity-travel patterns for non-mid-week days (Friday through Monday) that are typically ignored by the state-of-the-practice planning methods. The focus is on modeling the maintenance- and discretionary- activity decisions (duration and time of day) as such episodes are not undertaken on a daily basis and are likely to be undertaken on non-working days. Data from two national-level surveys from multiple years will be used to examine differences in activity participation over the days of the week and the changes in these weekly patterns over the last decade. The study also examines whether analysis from the two different surveys (trip-based and time-use surveys) yield the same patterns. We believe that the empirical findings will help us identify what aspects of travel patterns might be missed/under-emphasized by the state-of-the-practice focus on mid-week periods.
Planning for Incorporating Ancillary Demands in the Next Generation FSUTMS
PIs: Siva Srinivasan (UF), Xia Jin
Funding Agency: Florida Department of Transportation (subcontract from University of Florida)
Award Amount: $50,000 (project total $100,000)
Award Duration: 2013- 2014
Description:
Substantial efforts towards advancing Florida’s travel-demand modeling practice via Activity-based Models (ABMs) are directed at a single but substantial component of travel demand – the daily, internal-internal trips of the residents of the region. It is also critical to enhance the forecasting of the ancillary demands so as to improve the overall accuracy of the demand forecasts. This research aims to 1) identify the major ancillary-demand components that are relevant to the different modeling regions of Florida; 2) review current best practices in incorporating ancillary demands within the overall forecasting framework (both Trip-based and Activity-based); 3) document existing sources of data and future data need; and 4) develop a strategic plan document that will guide the process of enhancing the ancillary demand modeling efforts within FSUTMS.
Traffic Management Centers: Challenges, Best Practices, and Future Plans
PIs: Xia Jin, Albert Gan
Funding Agency: The National Center for Transportation System Productivity and Management (NCTSPM), Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT)
Award Amount: $65,000
Award Duration: 2012- 2014
Description:
Transportation management centers (TMCs) serve as the technical and institutional hubs that facilitate interagency coordination and integrate a wide range of traffic management strategies to achieve the collective goal of providing safe, efficient, and sustainable transportation infrastructure. This research aims at providing a nationwide review of best practices in TMCs with a focus on intelligent transportation systems (ITS) in terms of innovative tools, technologies, methods, and policies. A web-based survey will be conducted focusing on current applications as well as new methods and tools in various aspects of TMC operations and services.
Traffic Incident Management Program Assessment and Performance Measures
PIs: Xia Jin, Albert Gan
Funding Agency: District 4, Florida Department of Transportation
Award Amount: $69,997.60
Award Duration: 2012- 2014
Description:
As the key to improve congestion, traffic incident management (TIM) aims to detect, respond to and remove incidents and restore normal traffic capacity in the safest and quickest manner. During the past decade, a series of national initiatives have been deployed to improve TIM efforts in the United States. This study aims to leverage the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) District Four TIM program with national experiences. The objective for this project is to assess the District’s TIM program including policies, inter-agency coordination, response team/equipment, communications and information management, and training, etc, and identify potential areas for enhancements where applicable.
I-95 Ramp Metering Feasibility Study
PIs: Xia Jin, Albert Gan, Wanyang Wu
Funding Agency: District 4, Florida Department of Transportation (subcontract from AECOM)
Award Amount: $53,138.50
Award Duration: 2012- 2014
Description:
Develop and calibrate CORSIM simulation models to conduct a ramp metering feasibility study on 18 interchanges along I-95 in Broward County. Conduct on-ramps and adjacent arterial operations analysis, and environmental analysis.
Model Sensitivity and Acceptance Test Plan for the Best Practices Model (BPM) 2010 Base Year Update and Validation
PI: Xia Jin
Funding Agency: New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC) (subcontract from Parsons Brinckerhoff)
Award Amount: $10,697
Award Duration: 2012- 2014
Description:
Develop model sensitivity test procedures and measures for NYMTC to assess the updated and enhanced BPM.
City of Doral Economic Analysis
PI: Edward Murray
Funding Agency: City of Doral
Award Amount: $6,400 (project total $75,915)
Award Duration: 2017- 2017
Strategic Development Plan for the Urban Development Area of DISTRICT 11, Miami-Dade County
PI: Winifred Newman
Funding Agency: Miami-Dade County Commissioner’s Office
Award Amount: $6,800 (project total $95,453.71)
Award Duration: 2013- 2014
Consequence Based Route Selection for Hazardous Material Cargo: GIS-Based Time Progression of Environmental Impact Radius of Accidental Spills
PIs: Berrin Tansel, Xia Jin, Adjo Amekudzi (GT), Nasim Uddin (UAB)
Funding Agency: The National Center for Transportation System Productivity and Management (NCTSPM), Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT)
Award Amount: $20,000 (FIU total $50,000)
Award Duration: 2012- 2014
Description:
This study aims to investigate the transportation networks in order to identify the most suitable routes for transporting hazardous material cargoes. The potential key contribution of the study is the development of a decision tool to assist in comparing and selecting highway routes to transport hazardous materials. This research considered criteria in order to evaluate each link in the transportation network including health risks and cost of delay as a result of an en route accidental release of hazardous materials; as well as proximity to public places, and travel cost.
Reducing Service Interruptions in Linear Infrastructure Systems (Transportation and Water/Sewer) by Synchronizing Schedules for Selected Maintenance Activities
PIs: Berrin Tansel, Xia Jin, Adjo Amekudzi (GT)
Funding Agency: The National Center for Transportation System Productivity and Management (NCTSPM), Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT)
Award Amount: $5,000 (FIU total $25,000)
Award Duration: 2012- 2014
Description:
The objective of this study was to develop a framework for integrated assessment of service vulnerabilities based on individual system failure probabilities, consequences, and potential interactions transportation networks with pipeline (water and sewer) networks. A comprehensive integrated network methodology was developed to evaluate and quantify the interactions between different infrastructure networks which included transportation and pipeline systems for water and sewer services. The quantitative risks were evaluated in terms of the individual network vulnerabilities, interactions of different networks (traffic, water, sewer), affected service areas, number of vehicles, and delays in transportation (vehicle-hours) using ArcGIS.