CEE Seminar (ZOOM): Freight Data Applications for Transportation Planning

Abstract: Transportation agencies are tasked with forecasting freight movements, creating and evaluating policy to mitigate transportation impacts on infrastructure and air quality, and furnishing the information necessary for performance-driven investment that depends on quality, detailed and ubiquitous vehicle data. Unfortunately, in most cases freight data is either missing or expensive to obtain. In this presentation, Hernandez will discuss three research projects that used anonymized data to better understand freight activity: (1) The use of Lidar sensors to detect truck type, (2) The use of truck GPS data for truck parking facility capacity expansions, and (3) The use of truck and marine vessel movement data to quantify inland waterway port capacity.

Bio: Sarah Hernandez received her doctorate in civil and environmental Engineering with a specialization in transportation systems engineering from UC Irvine.  She holds a master's degree from UCI and a bachelor's degree from the University of Florida (Gainesville, Florida). Hernandez joined the University of Arkansas Department of Civil Engineering in August 2015. She teaches graduate classes on transportation planning and transportation data analysis. She is the faculty adviser for the student chapter of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and a member of ITE. Her research focuses on new and advanced technology applications in transportation systems engineering and is centered on developing tools and methods to collect and analyze freight and commercial vehicle operations data for long range freight planning.