The modeling of agriculture movements in a region is typically included in metropolitan, statewide, or regional freight models developed for metropolitan or state transportation planning organizations. They are modeled without context to a specific food chain. If attempting to model security-related transportation issues, this resolution is not adequate to satisfactorily identify potential problems. A farm-to-fork multi-modal agricultural freight model that simulates trips between specific origins and destinations such as farms and processing facilities, processing facilities and wholesalers, and wholesale facilities and retail establishments, should result in a robust modeling process. The model can be employed to identify critical nodes in the network or run security-based scenarios for different food chains. Utilizing a combination of datasets, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is investigating such a model to conduct security-related analyses for different food chains as part of the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In order to estimate freight trips for specific commodities, we propose to incorporate non-traditional sources of data with more typical transportation datasets.
Abstract