Project Summary
Freight planning is increasingly important because of steady increases in freight demand. Many states have realized the importance of the freight industry and have conducted freight planning studies in order to understand the existing problems in the freight network. Network integration is a significant factor in overall systems efficiency. Improvement projects should be directed to eliminate bottlenecks in the network. Our research focus is to develop an intermodal freight network design model that will serve as a decision support tool for allocating fixed budgets to such improvement projects. In order to analyze the benefits of improvement projects the model developed will combine a budget allocation model and a freight traffic assignment model in order to allocate the limited resources to the best set of improvement projects.
