Development of a regional routing model for strategic waterway analysis

The Navigation Economics Technologies suite of models is being developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to bring new analytic tools to the process of evaluating and planning navigation investments. A hierarchical and potentially iterative approach consisting of three levels, or tiers, has been proposed, one that moves from a broad regional and global geography in Tier 1, down to a detailed, project- and facility-specific level of detail in Tier 3. This paper describes the construction of a commodity flows database to support Tier-2 modeling. Called the regional routing model, it takes spatial disaggregations of broad regional forecasts of commodity flows to a point at which they can be assigned to specific modes and routes over the U.S. transportation network. The paper describes the model structure and how it is being tied closely to a multisource database constructed to support base year model calibration. A goal for the model is to be able to measure the effects on flows and transportation costs of changes to either the capacity of the transportation network or to the volume of goods produced and consumed. Some preliminary results are shown.