RSG assisted the Northeastern Indiana Regional Coordinating Council (NIRCC) with big data acquisition and analysis to better understand the regional movements of people and trucks in northeastern Indiana. RSG helped NIRCC select a big data vendor and negotiate a data subscription. We expanded the data using a multistep process including iterative screenline fitting by matrix partitioning and origin-destination matrix estimation (ODME). RSG then analyzed the data to produce various visualizations of the interaction between different communities within the region as well as the origins and destinations served by key facilities in the region.

The study found that the communities within the region were not necessarily more connected to each other than to the rest of the state. The study also found that travel to and from each community is more likely to be interregional than intraregional. Further, the analysis offered insights into the function of key facilities, which revealed that the recent growth in traffic on US 20 is due to local traffic and not trips diverting from the Indiana Toll Road.