Functional form & transport infrastructure, supply and demand

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FUNCTIONAL FORM AND TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURE AND DEMAND In transport planning, a number of questions arise that require the use of models, because models do better than our intuition at explaining and forecasting outcomes.To establish links between such outcomes and their determinants, relationships are postulated and the existence, direction and size of linkages is tested. This project deals with 3 aspects of these statistical linkage techniques within transport systems. THEORY. We focus on the way in which statistical relationships cannot be established independently from the mathematical form defining them. We work on form and linkage because they have to be studied and established jointly. TOOL DEVELOPMENT. In many areas of applied engineering, the size of samples is increasing. This informational drift, or sophistication factor, requires the adaptation of computer codes designed for more limited databases. Such adaptation of tools can make large samples of daily relevance. APPLICATION. These approaches, both theoretical and tool-based, are applicable to the components of transport system. Here we focus on demand, supply, and accident performance components, as we have done previously. But we extend applications to infrastructure durability matters arising: (i) from the damages caused by vehicles axles (e.g., trains and trucks) of varying weights to infrastructure; (ii) or from the degradation of concrete exposed to aggressive chemical environments. In the latter case, use of probabilistic methods is relatively recent and presents new challenges to the establishment of mutivariate statistical causality and of its form.