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Idaho Statewide Travel Demand Model

The Idaho Statewide Travel Demand Model (STDM) is designed to assist ITD in achieving its performance-based transportation planning goals. The model forecasts both person and truck travel, including local and through travel. Unlike traditional four-step travel demand models, the model forecasts travel at the person and freight level, which allows trips on the transportation system to be tagged with significant attributes such as trip purpose and commodity. Additionally, the model integrates with ITD’s economic impact analysis tools for understanding the economic benefits of transportation investment.

Hardware and Software Requirements

Hardware Requirements

The ITD STDM can be run on a typical workstation. The current requirements include:

• At least 40GB of RAM (required for the person travel model)
• At least 4 processing cores – additional cores will reduce runtime
• At least 20GB of free storage – a single model run currently takes around 8GB

Software Requirements

The model is configured to run on Windows, and uses Java, R, Cube, and SQL Server.

• Java - Java runtime v1.8.
• CUBE Voyager - Cube Voyager is a commercially available software package developed by Citilabs, Inc. for modeling and analysis of regional passenger transportation systems including roadways, public transit, pedestrians and bicycles.
• R - R v4.1.0, more information on R can be found at http://www.r-project.org. The following R packages are required to be installed as well:
  • Rhdf5 - http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/rhdf5.html
  • data.table - http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table
  • dplyr - http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/dplyr
  • stringr - http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/stringr
  • doParallel - http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/doParallel
  • Reshape2 - http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/reshape2
• SQL SERVER EXPRESS - The free Microsoft SQL Server Express is required for the population synthesizer. Refer to the Population Synthesizer technical memo for detailed installation instruction.

Creating and Running a Scenario

To create and run a new model scenario (run), do the following:

1. Use git software to clone the IdahoSTDM repository in a directory where you want to run the model. To do that use the Git Bash and navigate to the directory where you want to clone the model. Then use the git command git clone https://github.com/RSGInc/IdahoSTDM.git to clone the repository.
2. Checkout the develop branch. The git command for that is git checkout develop.
3. Update the location of the software install references in RunModel.bat if needed. The list of software install references are:
   1. JAVA_PATH
   2. TPP_PATH
   3. R_PATH
   4. PY_ACTIVATE
   5. PY_ENV_NAME
4. If running the population synthesizer:
   • Create a new PopSyn DB in SQL Server and set the SQLSERVER name and DATABASE name tokens in RunModel.bat
   • Edit RunModel.bat and set POPSYN=TRUE to run the PopSyn. It only needs to be run once for each land use scenario.
5. Edit the necessary input files for the scenario:
   1. Network – If there are network revisions for the scenario, edit the ITD.net in Cube before running the scenario.
   2. TAZ land use data – If there are population, employment, or PT shadow price revisions for the scenario, edit the TAZs.csv file in Excel before running the scenario.
   3. Model setup – Set the model year for the scenario. If desired, set the number of feedback iterations and PT household sample rate.
6. Open a DOS command prompt and navigate to the scenario folder.
7. Type RunModel.bat in the DOS window to run the model.