Time

1:40 p.m. – 3:00 p.m

Location

1605 Tilia, Room 1103, West Village

Speaker(s)

José Holguín-Veras, William H. Hart Professor and Director of the VREF Center of Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems, and the Center for Infrastructure, Transportation, and the Environment, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Abstract

In this talk, Professor Holguín-Veras will provide an overview of a new generation of analytical freight demand models that have been developed at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which specifically consider freight tours. These models are based on two different modeling principles: spatial price equilibrium and entropy maximization theory. Some of these models conduct a process of Freight Tour Synthesis (FTS) that infer demand patterns from easy-to-get secondary data such as traffic counts and freight trip generation estimates. The real-life applications of these models have confirmed their ability to produce meaningful estimates of freight activity. Because of their ability to consider tours, these models increase the realism of freight demand models and are uniquely capable of utilizing GPS data. At the end of the lecture, Professor Holguín-Veras will discuss preliminary results for National Freight Demand Model for Bangladesh.

Biographical Sketch

Dr. José Holguín-Veras, is the William H. Hart Professor and Director of the VREF Center of Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems, and the Center for Infrastructure, Transportation, and the Environment. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2013 White House’s Transportation Champion of Change Award, the 1996 Milton Pikarsky Memorial Award, and the 2001 National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award. His research interests are in the areas of: freight transportation modeling and economics, and humanitarian logistics. He is the most widely published and cited freight researcher in the world. He received his Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin in 1996; a M.Sc. from the Universidad Central de Venezuela in 1984; and a B.Sc. from the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo en 1982.