As a research assistant at RPI, Sofia is working on three projects related to freight. In collaboration with the Inter-American International Bank, freight routes in developing countries are being studied for their cost effect on the supply chain as well as their environmental impacts due to congestion. On this project she is in charge of using TransCAD (a GIS software) to position and analyze the routes. Closer to home, a survey is being conducted targeting carriers making deliveries to Manhattan NY in order to create a discrete choice model to model parking behavior. This model will be run with several simulations to understand the impacts that different policies could have. Lastly, Sofia is contributing to the formatting of a program to be implemented in New York City that facilitates the use of trusted vendors to make unassisted off hour deliveries. A lot of previous work has been done to prove this project’s effectiveness and they are creating a platform that will allow receivers to make informed decisions about trusted vendors.

As a master’s student, Sofia will be developing and finishing a thesis this year. While still in the beginning stages, Ms. Kyle will be working on a spatial econometric model to model the production of freight trips from different types of businesses. The model will be created using economic and geographic factors for each business. The final model will about able to estimate the freight production in specified areas using available information from the US Census and GIS data. These estimations can be used to model truck trips in transportation networks and estimate their impacts on systems.