National Center for Sustainable Transportation

The Motor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES) model was developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) to estimate emissions from on-road and off-road vehicles in the United States. The MOVES model represents a significant improvement over the older MOBILE series of modes, primarily because emission rates are now much more modal in nature, representing emissions as a function of power surrogates, which depend on speed and acceleration. Traffic simulation model outputs and smartphone GPS data can provide second by-second vehicle activity data in time and space, including vehicle speed and acceleration data. Coupling high-resolution 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 MOVES interface is complicated and the structure of input variables and algorithms involved in running MOVES to assess operational improvements makes analyses cumbersome and time consuming. The MOVES interface also makes it difficult to assess complicated transportation networks and to undertake analyses of large scale systems that are dynamic in nature. The MOVES-Matrix system developed by the research team can be used to perform emissions modeling activities in a fraction of the time compared to running MOVES. The approach involves running the MOVES model iteratively, across all potential input variable combination, and using the resulting multidimensional array of pre-run MOVES outputs in emissions modeling.

View the NCST Project Webpage