In today’s world of volatile fuel prices and climate concerns, there is little study on the relation between vehicle ownership patterns and attitudes toward potential policies and vehicle technologies. This work provides new data on ownership decisions and owner preferences under various scenarios, coupled with calibrated models to microsimulate Austin’s household-fleet evolution. Results suggest that most Austinites (63%, population-corrected share) support a feebate policy to favor more fuel efficient vehicles. Top purchase criteria are vehicle purchase price, type/class, and fuel economy (with 30%, 21% and 19% of respondents placing these in their top three). Most (56%) respondents also indicated that they would seriously consider purchasing a Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) if it were to cost $6,000 more than its conventional, gasoline-powered counterpart. And many respond strongly to signals on the external (health and climate) costs of a vehicle’s emissions, more strongly than they respond to information on fuel cost savings. 25-year simulations suggest that 19% of Austin’s vehicle fleet could be comprised of Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) and PHEVs under adoption of a feebate policy (along with PHEV availability in Year 1 of the simulation, and current gas prices throughout). Under all scenarios vehicle usage levels (in total vehicle miles traveled [VMT]) are predicted to increase overall, along with average vehicle ownership levels (per household, and per capita); and a feebate policy is predicted to raise total regional VMT slightly (just 4.43 percent, by simulation year 25), relative to the trend scenario, while reducing CO2 emissions only slightly (by 3.8 percent, relative to trend). Doubling the trend-case gas price to $5/gallon is simulated to reduce the year-25 vehicle use levels by 17% and CO2 emissions by 22% (relative to trend). Two- and three-vehicle households are simulated to be the highest adopters of HEVs and PHEVs across all scenarios. And HEVs, PHEVs and Smart Cars are estimated to represent a major share of the fleet’s VMT (25%) by year 25 under the feebate scenario. The combined share of vans, pickup trucks, sport utility vehicles (SUVs), and cross over utility vehicles (CUVs) is lowest under the feebate scenario, at 35% (versus 47% in Austin’s current household fleet), yet feebate-policy receipts exceed rebates in each simulation year. A 15% reduction in the usage levels of SUVs, CUVs and minivans is observed in the $5/gallon scenario (relative to trend). Mean use levels per vehicle of HEVs and PHEVs are simulated to have a variation of 753 and 495 across scenarios. In the longer term, gas price dynamics, tax incentives, feebates and purchase prices along with new technologies, government-industry partnerships, and more accurate information on range and recharging times (which increase customer confidence in EV technologies) should have even more significant effects on energy dependence and greenhouse gas emissions. / text

The Portfolio Analysis Management Office (PAMO) for the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) at NASA Headquarters tasked the Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at NASA Langley to combine efforts with Virginia Tech to develop a global demand model with the capability to predict future demand in the air transportation field. A previous study (Alsalous, 2015) started the development of the Global Demand Mode (GDM) to predict air travel demand based on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and population trends for 3,974 airports worldwide. The study was done from year 2016 to year 2040. This research project intends to enhance the GDM capabilities. A Fratar model is implemented for the distribution of the forecast demand during each year. The Fratar model uses a 3,974 by 3,974 origin-destination matrix to distribute the demand among 55,612 unique routes in the network. Moreover, the GDM is capable to estimate the aircraft fleet mix per route and the number of flights per aircraft that are needed to satisfy the forecast demand. The model adopts the aircraft fleet mix from the Official Airline Guide data for the year 2015. Once the aircraft types are distributed and flights are assigned, the GDM runs an aircraft retirement and replacement analysis to remove older generation aircraft from the network and replace them with existing or newer aircraft. The GDM continues to evolve worldwide aircraft fleet by introducing 14 new generation aircraft from Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier, and Embraer and 5 Advanced Technology Aircraft from NASA. / Master of Science / The Portfolio Analysis Management Office (PAMO) for the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) at NASA Headquarters tasked the Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at NASA Langley to combine efforts with Virginia Tech to develop a global demand model with the capability to predict future demand in the air transportation field. A previous study (Alsalous, 2015) started the development of the Global Demand Mode (GDM) to predict air travel demand based on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and population trends for 3,974 airports worldwide. The study was done from year 2016 to year 2040. The previous study done by Alsaous, predicts how many seats will be departing out of the 3,974 airports worldwide. This project intends to use the outputs of the GDM and distribute the seats predicted among the airports. The objective is to predict how many seats will be offered that will be departing from airport “A” and arriving at airport “B”. For this, a Fratar model was implemented. The second objective of this project is to estimate what will the aircraft fleet be in the future and how many flights will be needed to satisfy the predicted air travel demand. If the number of seats going from airport A to airport B is known, then, by analyzing real data it can be estimated what type of aircraft will be flying from airport “A” to airport “B” and how many flights each aircraft will have to perform in order to satisfy the forecasted demand. Besides of estimating the type of aircraft that will be used in the future, the modeled created is capable of introducing new aircraft that are not part of the network yet. Fourteen new generation aircraft from Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier, and Embraer and 5 Advanced Technology Aircraft from NASA.