General Events

Join NCTSPM for this Transportation Speaker Series event, featuring Dr. Laurie A. Garrow, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Garrow will be speaking on the topic of "Estimation of Airline Itinerary Choice Models Using Disaggregate Ticket Data".

Airline itinerary choice models support many multi-million dollar decisions, e.g., they are used to evaluate potential route schedules. Classic models suffer from major limitations, most notably they use average fare information but to not correct for price endogeneity.   We use a novel database of airline tickets to estimate itinerary choice models using detailed fare data and compare these to classic itinerary choice models that use aggregate fare information but correct for price endogeneity.  In order to estimate these large itinerary choice models, we developed a new freeware program, called Larch.  Benchmarking experiments against Stata and Biogeme showed that the size of the input estimation files are 50 to 100 times larger in Stata and Biogeme, respectively. Estimation times are also much faster in Larch; e.g., for a small itinerary choice problem, a multinomial logit model estimated in Larch converged in less than one second whereas the same model took almost 15 seconds in Stata and more than three minutes in Biogeme. For more complex discrete choice models, such as the ordered generalized extreme value model, estimation times were two seconds in Larch and four to five days in Biogeme.

Dr. Laurie Garrow is an Associate Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.  Dr. Garrow is a leading expert in the modeling of air traveler behavior, especially as it pertains to the prediction of travel demand. She earned her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at Northwestern University. Her dissertation was recognized with awards from INFORMS and IATBR. She has received multiple national awards for research including the prestigious ASCE Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize, the CUTC-ARTBA New Faculty Award, and a NSF CAREER award. She currently serves as President of AGIFORS and has served as President of the Transportation Science & Logistics Society of INFORMS.  You can learn more about Dr. Garrow’s work on this project online at  https://vimeo.com/arccorp/review/179763855/84e0ac4e82. 

Join NCTSPM for this Transportation Speaker Series event, featuring Dr. Roger Wayson, Ph.D. and P.E., Research Engineer at KBRWyle. Dr. Wayson will be speaking on the topic of "Continuing to Understand and Improve Regulatory Models for Transportation Air Quality".

Regulatory models for both emission and dispersion modeling are continually being updated to use in transportation air quality analysis.  It is important that the underlying assumptions and implementation of methods are understood in these models to avoid misuse and/or large errors.  Additionally, it is important that the development and updating of these models continue as we better understand the needs, uses, and desires of the analyst.  This presentation explores two topic areas from three different research efforts.  The first area covered will be specific to the EPA motor vehicle emission model (MOVES) while the second part discusses dispersion modeling of aircraft at airports.  The MOVES project that will be discussed involves modeling of ethanol blends with MOVES; in regards to both inputs and how the output emissions are changed.  The dispersion modeling will review how LiDAR measurements have been used to improve estimates from the EPA dispersion model AERMOD at airports as used in FAA regulatory models and possible future enhancements.  The presentation will conclude with a discussion of using Puff modeling applications at airports.

Dr. Roger Wayson has been working in the fields of noise and air pollution measurements, modeling, and abatement, primarily from mobile sources, for over 44 years. He has a Bachelor and Masters degree from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University.  He has authored numerous papers on transportation noise/air quality and was a lead author with the 2007 IPCC Nobel Peace Prize winning team.  He retired as a full professor from the University of Central Florida to take a job with the U.S. Department of Transportation as a National Expert in the Environmental Measurement and Modeling Division at the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center.  He recently retired from his government position to take on another challenge and is working as a Research Engineer with KBRWyle. 

Join NCTSPM for this Transportation Speaker Series event, featuring Dr. Patricia Mokhtarian, Susan G. and Christopher D. Pappas Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Mokhtarian will be speaking on the topic of "Well-being and Travel: Retrospect and Prospect".

Although the improvement of well-being is often an implicitly-assumed goal of many, if not most, policies, the study of subjective well-being (SWB) and travel has so far been confined to a relatively small segment of the travel behavior community.  Accordingly, one main purpose of this talk is to introduce a larger share of the community to some fundamental SWB-related concepts and their application in transportation research, with the goal of attracting others to this rewarding area of study.  At the same time, however, I also hope to offer some useful reflections to those already working in this field.  After presenting some basic issues of terminology and measurement of SWB, I present four conceptual models relating travel and subjective well-being.  Following one of those models, I review five ways in which travel can influence well-being.  I conclude by examining some challenges associated with assessing the impacts of travel on well-being, as well as challenges associated with applying what we learn to policy.

Patricia Mokhtarian is the Susan G and Christopher D Pappas Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech.  Prior to joining Tech in 2013, she spent 23 years at the University of California, Davis, where she was a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, associate director of the Institute of Transportation Studies, and founding chair of the interdisciplinary MS/PhD program in Transportation Technology and Policy.  Dr. Mokhtarian has specialized in the study of travel behavior for more than 30 years, and has authored or co-authored more than 200 refereed journal articles, technical reports, and other publications.  She is the current chair of the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research.  She is a North American area editor of the journal Transportation, and is on the editorial boards of Transportation Research Part A, Transport Policy, Transportation Letters, the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation, the European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research, and Travel Behavior and Society.  Her PhD is from Northwestern University.  Dr. Mokhtarian's Google Scholar profile may be seen at: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=84jTPKEAAAAJ.

Join NCTSPM and the Georgia section of ITE for a picnic at their monthly meeting. More details will follow soon.