Innovations in Travel Modeling Conference

Innovations in Travel Modeling Conference

6th Conference, May 2016, Denver, Colorado

The conference organizers have been kind enough to devote a session to our topic on the morning of Wednesday, May 4, from 8:30 am to 10:00 am. I propose we organize the session as follows:

Getting Down to the Business of Advancing Travel Modeling Practice

How would a business or foundation approach advancing/improving travel modeling research and practice? By first articulating their mission, vision, and goals, and then focusing on a finite list of concrete next steps. Please come prepared to roll up your sleeves and join us for an interactive working session in which we tackle these tasks.

Co-moderators: Billy Charlton, Brian Gardner, David Ory, Elizabeth Sall, and Joan Walker

Part 1: Mission, Vision, Goals (8:30 to 9:30 am)

Let's pretend we have formed a foundation committed to improving travel modeling practice. This is our first formal meeting and we are setting out to articulate the Mission, Vision, and Goals of our newly-formed body. In the first hour of the session, we'll first introduce the concept by showing the mission/vision/goals statements of well-known corporations, e.g. Google, Campbell's Soup. In addition, we will consider the mission/vision/goals statements of well-known non-profits, such as [Apache Foundation] (http://www.apache.org/foundation/), [World Bank] (http://tinyurl.com/grascb5), [RAND Corporation] (http://www.rand.org/about/vision.html), etc.

We'll then work in small groups to brainstorm our hypothetical foundation's Mission, Vision, and Goals, recording our ideas in GitHub (a GitHub-ready individual will staff each table) or Google Docs. To facilitate the process given limited time, the discussion will be seeded with an initial set of missions/visions/goals that will be developed beforehand. Participants can choose to join a group focused on refining one of the existing missions/visions/goals, or to join one or more "none of the above" groups and initiate their own. Examples of starting points can be drawn from the list of goals currently shown in the Proposed Solution section of this GitHub code repository.

We'll then come together to discuss the different ideas. The audience will be asked to vote on the mission/vision/goal presented by each group using the -1, 0, +1 metric. While the outcome will be non-binding, this will provide a means of gauging initial sentiment.

Part 2: Concrete Next Steps (9:30 to 10:00 am)

Having set the stage in Part 1, we'll seek volunteers to put together a set of concrete next steps to move ADB40's Advancing the Science initiative forward. We'll come ready with a few suggestions and seek others from the audience. Suggestions could include:

• Formulating a "test bed" grant program -- in order to advance travel modeling practice, we need to establish at least two test beds in which multiple modeling systems can be trained and evaluated. This task will involve spec'ing a detailed grant program that could incentivize partnerships between universities, MPOs, State DOTs, and others to bring resources to the table and commit their region to being a test bed.
• Model v. Model -- to encourage academics to engage in useful model development work, let's establish a contest in which modeling systems can compete head to head. How would this work? What would the rules be?
• Relationship to journals -- the medium for the scientific exchange of ideas has traditionally been the peer-reviewed academic journal. However, a written paper is arguably a poor mechanism for sharing a model when the code and associated data get lost on a grad student's computer. Is there a way to partner with journals such that the associated digital content becomes shareable, transparent and reproducible? What would that partnership look like? Are there mechanisms that other academic communities ( e.g., arXiv.org ) use to more readily disseminate findings that could be of interest to ours?
• Incentives -- Can we articulate the incentives that would cause key groups to participate? Is it good will? Prestige? Positioning for grants? Groups might include: public agencies, academics, funding bodies.
• Software Incubation -- Establish a structure to collectively develop and own key pieces of software and technology that have yet to be commercially available or viable.
• Data Standards -- Establish a process to collectively develop, adopt, and update data standards for our industry.