NDSU graduate research assistant Mohammad Molla presented a paper and a poster at the 2015 American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Geographic Information Systems for Transportation Symposium in Des Moines, Iowa.

Molla’s paper, “Transferability of Activity-Based Travel Demand Model to Small/Medium Size Region,” described generation of synthetic populations using iterative proportional fitting and Monte Carlo simulations for the Fargo-Moorhead Metropolitan Area in order to develop a regional activity-based travel demand model. Co-writers of the paper are Diomo Motuba, and Matthew Stone. Molla is a doctoral student in transportation and logistics and conducts research with Motuba in the Advanced Traffic Analysis Center, a part of NDSU’s Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute. Stone is an assistant professor of construction management and engineering.

Molla’s “Detecting Traffic Accident Hot Spots and Clusters Using Single Linkage Method and GIS in North Dakota,” described development of a geostatistical approach for detecting traffic crash events and provided methodologies for county-level clustering based on new severity index based on 37 years of fatal crash data. Co-writers are Stone, and EunSu Lee. Lee is a researcher with the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute.

As a student-focused, land-grant, research university, we serve our citizens.