Intermodal transportation network custom evaluators for environmental policy analysis
ESRI 2007 international user conference paper.
Abstract
We are leveraging the power of GIS-based transportation network analysis to provide tools for public policy analysts to understand the environmental impact trade-offs of intermodal transportation networks that integrate truck, rail, and inter-coastal waterway modes of transportation. We will describe the environmental policy analysis problem, the intermodal network model, and the creation of environmental network attributes and custom attribute evaluators. We will describe what drove our choice to use C# and the Microsoft .NET framework to design and develop evaluators that access external data from relational databases and that have their own evaluator configuration user interfaces. We will conclude with a description of possible next steps, including evaluator access of environmental data from external web services, a way for policy analysts to create new attributes and custom evaluators without any programming skills, and porting the desktop-based system to a web and server-based system for broad deployment.
