The U.S. transportation sector is responsible for 27% of all domestic greenhouse gas emissions, which negatively impact millions of Americans and their communities every year. As the U.S. seeks to cut all greenhouse emissions from the transportation sector by 2050, emission reduction innovations are essential. This Exploratory Topic seeks to develop the low-carbon intermodal freight transportation system of the future, with the goal of minimizing greenhouse gas emissions and maximizing freight resiliency. Project innovations developed within this Exploratory Topic will support the deployment of energy infrastructure and logistics for moving goods across maritime, rail, and road transportation in the United States. This will be accomplished through developing models that enable prioritization of low-carbon energy infrastructure deployment, along with data required for the effective deployment of this optimized distribution system. The projects will also develop logistics models that enable predictive and responsive optimization of modal choice, inter- or intra- modal transfer, and routing consistent with future energy systems. (Direct Link)
This project aims to develop a cognitive digital twin for the United States backbone intermodal freight transportation system, including road, rail, and waterway, to maximize efficiency and resiliency and minimize life-cycle GHG emissions. Specifically, this digital representation, namely RECOIL (Resiliency and Emission Control through Optimizing Intermodal Logistics), enables the national freight system flow planning, scheduling, and optimization within 24 hours. It can also provide locally optimized route rescheduling upon disruptions (e.g., natural disasters, traffic congestions, etc.) within 1 hour. RECOIL is built on innovative ontology-driven knowledge graphs and a powerful Data Engine to discover, retrieve, and integrate heterogeneous cyberinfrastructure sources of intermodal freight data. An Analytics Engine is developed inside a microservice architecture to produce optimized solutions for life cycle analysis and current and projected energy costs using optimization methods, including stochastic programming, robust optimization, and machine learning methods. RECOIL enables both “what-if” and “if-what” analyses in freight transportation by road, rail, and waterway to provide freight flows at the route level and projected freight scenarios from 2023 to 2050. The solutions will be distributed broadly through websites with frontend user-friendly graphic interfaces and backend adaptive application programming interfaces (APIs). RECOIL is well aligned with ARPA-E Mission Area of applied research and development of transformative science and technology solutions to address energy and environmental missions by the Department of Energy, under the America COMPETES Act of 2007 (P.L. 110-69) and the amended Energy Act of 2020 (P.L. 116-260).
The project is funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), U.S. Department of Energy (#DE-AR0001780).