Per our Strategic Plan, our Committee's Research Coordinator (CRC) is focused on the following objective: 

Maintain a robust research portfolio, demonstrating understanding of research needs among the travel demand forecasting community.

This objective will be worked towards with the following outputs

• Research needs statements submitted to the the TRB's Research Needs Statement portal

• Calls for Papers 

• Workshops + webinars

Based on surveys and discussions at a workshop at the 2023 TRB Annual Meeting, the Committee is pursuing priorities in the following six areas:

1.  Connected and autonomous vehicles 

2.  Equity and representation

3.  New mobility

4.  Electrification, electric vehicles, and energy transformation

5.  Advantages and disadvantages of “Big Data”

6.  Travel behavior and traveler decision making

AEP50 is continuing efforts to prioritize and draft research needs statements, based on these areas. 

Are you interested in helping to refine the technical, policy, application, data-related, and/or other dimensions of our 6 priority research areas? Let us know.

Per our Strategic Plan, our Committee's Paper Review Coordinator (PRC) orients towards achieving the following objectives:

1. Improve the quality of submitted, presented, and published research.

2. A just and equitable paper review and publication process.

The paper review process begins each summer with an update to the paper reviewer pool, peaks in early-to-mid August with the assignment of papers to reviewers, and concludes October 1st with selection of papers to be included in the TRB Annual Meeting and forwarded to the Transportation Research Record Editorial Board.  If you are interested in helping out with the paper review organization process, please let us know.

During the "off season", the PRC leads a team in assessing how well we did as a community with paper reviews by reviewing data and feedback – and strategizing about how to update and refine the process for the next year.

Research Review Participation

The PRC oversees the following teams to assist in the paper review process

1. Chandra Bot Team: maintains data and software that assist the PRC in understanding how we did in the past and what strategy we should use to improve into the future.

2. Paper Review Organization Team: assigns reviewers to papers based on information from Chandra Bot and a strategy overseen by the PRC.

3. Paper Reviewers: completes high quality reviews of submitted papers annually between August 15th-September 15th

4. PRC + Chair: together determines final accept/reject of each paper and their placement in the TRB Annual Meeting Program.

Chandra Bot All-Stars

One of the ways that we promote high-quality reviews is by annually honoring our most outstanding review contributors by algorithmically assessing review quality using Chandra Bot (named in honor of our Committee's former chair, Dr. Chandra Bhat) and adding to our growing class of Chandra Bot All-Stars.

Current criteria for becoming an All-Star:

• Use the full scoring range

• Provide commentary to the author

• Provide a thoughtful recommendation for presentation

In addition to the Travel Forecasting Resource, the Technology Transfer Subcommittee is beginning to undertake the identification and dissemination of recent relevant research advances to the Committee Community.  Help always appreciated.