From 2006 to 2017, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments/National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board (COG/TPB) staff hired a series of consultants to assist with both development of the TPB Travel Demand Forecasting Model (TDFM) and research about travel demand forecasting. The consultant assistance work was carried out using one-year contracts, which were renewable up to two times, allowing any one consultant to hold the contract for up to three years before rebidding the contract. Based on a strategic plan for model development developed in 2015, TPB staff decided to use a new, multi-year contract to develop the TPB’s next-generation TDFM, a disaggregate, activity-based travel model (ABM), known as the TPB’s Gen3 Travel Model. The Gen3 Model is now in its third and final phase of development and the associated contract, which lasted about six years, will be ending in December 2025. Consequently, the COG/TPB staff have now decided to return to the previous contractual pattern, i.e., hiring an on-call modeling consultant for a period of 1-3 years before re-bidding. COG/TPB staff is open to any qualified consultant, not simply those who have worked for COG in the past. TPB staff expect to release a beta version of the Gen3 Model in fall of 2025. After beta testing, and some potential updates, the TPB staff hopes to declare the Gen3 Model to be production-ready by the spring of 2026, meaning that it would be ready for production-use modeling work in support of TPB’s regional planning processes, such as the update of the next Long-Range Transportation Plan (LRTP)/Metropolitan Transportation Plan (MTP), the air quality conformity analysis of that plan, and the performance analysis of the plan. COG/TPB staff is now seeking an on-call travel modeling consultant, which would provide assistance with travel demand forecasting methods that are, and will be, used by the COG/TPB staff. COG has developed a statement of work (SOW) in this RFP that gives examples of the types of task orders that would be issued under this contract. Note that each task order would have its own specific SOW, so the SOW in this RFP merely shows the types of projects that COG/TPB staff will likely undertake with the selected consultant. Furthermore, Task #1 (“Attend relevant meetings and provide ad-hoc assistance to TPB staff on matters not covered by other task orders”) would be an annual task order, whereas the other tasks described in this RFP would typically be conducted once during a three-year period.
