Input Guidelines for Motor Vehicle Emissions Simulator Model, Volume 3: Final Report (2015)

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8.0 Tool Development Four tools were developed that are designed to assist MOVES users with preparing inputs. The tools are: • MOVES Operating Mode Data Import Tool – Utility program that assists MOVES users in taking vehicle trajectories from a traffic simulation model and converting them to operating mode distributions for input to MOVES. • MOVES Meteorology Data Import Tool – Utility program that reads the National Climatic Data Center Local Climatological Data in ASCII format and carries out most of the steps to convert it to MOVES temperature/relative humidity CSV input format. • MOVES Highway Statistics Analysis Tool – Excel spreadsheet that calculates state-level road type distributions and VMT fractions by HPMS vehicle type, for all 50 states, from data reported by FHWA in the Highway Statistics Series. • MOVES VTRIS Analysis Tool – Excel spreadsheet that provides summary tabulations from the 2012 Vehicle Travel Information System, for states reporting classified traffic count data to FHWA. This tool provides sample hour and day of week VMT fractions by state, road type, and vehicle class. The software and data input requirements for these tools are documented in the MOVES Tool Documentation that accompanies the tools. The Operating Mode Data Import Tool is a stand-alone utility that requires the Microsoft.Net Framework to run. The user is responsible for any preprocessing required to convert the output from their traffic simulation model to a generic format employed in the trajectory input file for this tool. This includes mapping of vehicle types (which vary for different models) to the 13 MOVES source types. The tool prepares a file directly usable for MOVES operating mode distribution input in the Project Data Manager. To run the meteorology data import tool, called LCD-to-MOVES, the user creates a directory, then downloads the 12 monthly Local Climatological Data files from the National Climatic Data Center web site. The user provides the program with the location of these files. The program will, in turn, extract a summary of the hour information from the 12 files and output a single 12-month MOVES-ready meteorological input file. The Highway Statistics Analysis Tool and VTRIS Analysis Tool were originally developed for the purpose of creating sample data on temporal VMT and road type distributions, using available data from states as reported to FHWA. It was then determined to provide the tools to users so that they could examine data from their own state, in addition to the summary tables and charts presented in the Final Report and Practitioners’ Handbook. The Highway Statistics Analysis 8-1

Tool can be easily updated by pasting in the latest year’s data tables from Highway Statistics Tables VM-2 and VM-4. The VTRIS Analysis Tool utilizes data created from queries in Microsoft Access and therefore cannot be easily updated. However, users could create similar data tabulations for their own state using classified traffic count data collected by their state DOT. 8-2