Southeast Annual Symposium on Freight and Mobility
The 2026 Southeast Annual Symposium on Freight and Mobility, organized by the Center for Regional and Rural Connected Communities (CR2C2) and CTR, showcased the critical work being done at the intersection of rural necessity and global resilience. From April 14-16, researchers from various organizations gathered to move beyond theory and toward actionable deployment. While the event featured a broad range of insights from several institutions, the contributions from our own UTK and CTR-affiliated researchers were central to many of the technical discussions.
The event began on Tuesday with the Southeast Data Competition, where our UT team of Zeinab Bayati, Xinyu Hu, and Mohammad Khojastepur competed, followed by a tour of the CTR labs at the Tickle College of Engineering at the University of Tennessee and networking sessions.
Wednesday’s itinerary bridged mission-driven research with industry reality. After an overview of the goals driving FERSC, CR2C2, and CTR, attendees chose between specialized rooms. In the CR2C2 track, CTR Associate Director Jerry Everett and Asad Khattak addressed the vital need to integrate emergent technologies into rural transportation planning and policy. Meanwhile, CTR Director Kevin Heaslip opened the FERSC room with a research overview.
A lunch keynote from Abdullah Al Khaled, Senior Data Science Manager at Walmart Global Tech, provided an industry perspective on how this research scales to meet global logistics demands.
The afternoon sessions delved into the mechanics of safety and supply chain survival, highlighting several UTK-led projects. Subhadeep Chakraborty presented research on the challenges of operating automated vehicles on rural roads, while Mohammad Khojastepur, Yangsong Gu, and Lee D. Han presented alongside partners on topics covering freight mode choice, freight network resilience, and freight telematics data.
The final day focused on human-centric transportation and disaster mitigation. Matthew Davis presented an analysis of Demand Response Transit (DRT) to improve travel for the elderly, women, and the disabled in rural areas. Simultaneously, Marcella Kaplan discussed “Delivery Deserts” and service challenges, before Mingzhou Jin spoke about his application of stochastic programming to the threat of flash flooding on freight networks.
The symposium concluded with a Demonstration and Deployment Forum, where Lee D. Han (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) joined Sal Hernandez (Oregon State University) and Dave LT (Compass IoT) to show how telematics data can be implemented to generate reliable disruption measures, taking research directly from the lab to the road.
We at CTR are very grateful to everyone who made this event possible and allowed this amazing opportunity for information exchange to happen. If you found this event intriguing, don’t miss the next one!