Exhibit D - Research Project Requirement: PDF Link

Project Summary: Rural residents routinely cross county and regional boundaries to reach jobs, specialist healthcare, training, and intercity connections their home communities lack. The services that could carry these trips such as rural demand-responsive transit (DRT), non-emergency medical transportation, employer shuttles, volunteer drivers, and regional fixed-route transit, operate as uncoordinated, single-purpose options whose service areas end at jurisdictional lines. This project develops and tests coordinated rural access hubs with shared pickup, transfer, and staging points where multiple services and trip purposes aggregate demand and synchronize connections, using operations-research optimization and agentic-AI methods. Across five tasks, the team will define inter-regional use cases and baseline access from imperfect rural data; build a multi-agent simulation of riders, vehicles, drivers, fixed-route services, hubs, and agencies; evaluate coordination strategies such as vanpool grouping, transfer timing, and hub placement, using a West Alabama rural-manufacturing workforce case; produce a practitioner toolkit and generalizability guidance, and deliver a transition plan to practice.

• TBD

• TBD

• TBD

TBD