National Transport Analysis Platform

The DfT requires an analytical platform that is robust, scalable, distributed, combining methods across analytical disciplines to produce analysis for national transport policies. This requires an end-to-end solution from transport modelling through appraisal analysis to visualisation of results.

The scale and expectations of the use of analysis in policy making has increased significantly and we are looking for a system to help us meet that analytical need. While remaining with the same staffing levels.

Current situation The national transport model has around 7,100 zones, 136,000 links, 46,000 nodes, 5 assigned user classes, 3 time periods, route choice for the assigned demand segments (apart from buses that are a pre-load). In the demand model there are 8 Journey Purposes, mode choice for 6 modes, and destination choice.

Typically to use the national transport model takes around 5 working days. 1 day to setup and quality assure the inputs and assumptions, half a day to setup and run the LGV model and the freight model, 11-12 hours to run a forecast year through both VDM and highway assignment, anything from half a day to 2 days to check the model results, and then a similar amount of time to generate presentation quality visualisations. All these stages have significant amounts of manual quality assurance, and manual data handling, with the exception of validating the approach and the setup data, all the internal manual handling and QA are in scope for being removed with as many modules running in parallel as possible.