MOVES-Matrix for high-performance on-road energy and running emission rate modeling applications

The MOVES model was developed by the US EPA to estimate emissions from on-road mobile sources and nonroad sources in the US. Coupling high-resolution on-road vehicle activity data with appropriate MOVES emission rates further advances research efforts designed to assess the environmental impacts of transportation design and operation strategies. However, the complicated MOVES interface and slow performance makes it difficult to assess large, regional scale transportation networks and to undertake analyses of large-scale systems that are dynamic in nature. The MOVES-Matrix system develops an initial Large Matrix of MOVES outputs by running MOVES 146,853 times on the PACE high performance computing cluster to generate more than 90 billion emission rates to populate the matrix for a single area with one fuel regime and one inspection and maintenance program. A total of 117 Large Matrices is needed for the entire country. The MOVES-Matrix system developed could be used to conduct the emissions modeling 200-times faster than using MOVES. The hypothetical case study showed that MOVES-Matrix was able to generate the exact same emission results as the MOVES model to ensure the validity for regulatory analysis. The resulting matrix allowed users to link emission rates to big data projects and to evaluate changes in emissions for dynamic transportation systems in near-real-time. MOVES-Matrix does not currently estimate emissions from starts, hoteling or evaporative emissions, and the research team is working on MOVES-Matrix version 2 that supports incorporating off-network modeling.