Commercial Vehicle Distributions in Road NETwork (CV-DRNET) – Sequential Network Element Imputation Method

No readily available public data exists for vehicle class and weight information that covers the entire U.S. highway network. The Travel Monitoring Analysis System (TMAS), managed by the Federal Highway Administration covers only less than 1% of the US highway network. This statistical method imputes vehicle class and weight distribution for every segment of the U.S. nationwide major truck highway network. 

Description

This technology is a heuristic approach for imputing various segment-level information, such as traffic volume, speed, weights, and vehicle class. This allows for traffic estimation on segments where technology does not exist to measure it – about 98 percent of the nationwide road network. 

The method uses three data sources: TMAS, Freight Analysis Framework 5 (FAF5), and Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS). The resulting data can be used not only to impute vehicle class and weight distributions for truck flows, but also to estimate other network information such as speed, average payload, share of empty trucks, and other factors. The technology estimates energy demand for a given route for commercial and passenger vehicles. It can also help determine how and where to put chargers for electric vehicles. This method could be applied to other transportation networks, such as rail, water, and pipeline flow.

Benefits

• Imputes vehicle class and weight distributions for truck flows.
• Estimates other network information i.e. speed, average payload, share of empty trucks.
• Can be applied in real-time assessment of freight network disruptions. 
• Optimizes freight operations.
• Estimates energy demand.
• Can be used for passenger or commercial vehicles.
• Can be applied to other transportation networks, such as rail, water, and pipeline. 

Applications and Industries

• Any industry that uses freight information, i.e. vehicle class, weight, time-of-day, speed, payload, etc.
• Trucking, where optimizing alternative routes given real-time information is needed.
• Energy demand estimation for passenger and commercial vehicles. 
• Real-time assessment of freight truck flow disruptions.
• Providing tool or service of the aforementioned analyses.

Contact

To learn more about this technology, email partnerships@ornl.gov or call 865-574-1051.