Advanced Transportation Optimization and Modeling (ATOM)

The U.S. transportation system is experiencing increasing complexity driven by evolving infrastructure, land-use patterns, travel demand, demographic shifts, and rapid advances in vehicle and mobility technologies. Emerging behaviors such as telecommuting, ridesharing, and micromobility, along with changing attitudes toward public transit and vehicle ownership, are reshaping how people and goods move across regions. To ensure that transportation investments remain efficient, resilient, and cost-effective, transportation agencies require advanced, data-driven tools to anticipate and evaluate the system-level impacts of these changes.  This project develops an advanced transportation modeling and optimization pipeline in Austin, Texas, to evaluate the impacts of alternative strategies and technologies through scenario-based analysis. The system will be built around the Behavior, Energy, Autonomy, and Mobility (BEAM) model. BEAM is an open-source, agent-based regional transportation model that enables realistic simulation of travel behavior, mode choice, fuel consumption, and system performance, and associated community-level impacts under different “what-if” scenarios.  By leveraging BEAM’s scalable, modular architecture, the project will address key limitations of conventional four-step and activity-based transportation models, providing a robust framework for testing strategies such as emerging technologies, infrastructure enhancements, and new mobility services before deployment. The pipeline will be developed and extended to assess additional impacts (via coupling to additional models) and therefore to serve as a decision-support tool for engineers, planners, and service providers, allowing them to evaluate performance outcomes and trade-offs across multiple metrics relevant to both economic productivity and community outcomes. Model calibration and validation of the Austin BEAM Core pipelines will utilize highly resolved local datasets on traffic flows, speeds, and network performance. These data will enable precise representation of real-world operating conditions in the Austin region and ensure the model’s reliability for planning and investment analysis.  Scenario development will be coordinated with implementation partners regional stakeholders identified through a stakeholder mapping exercise. These scenarios will reflect practical policy and technology options under active consideration in Texas, ensuring alignment with state and regional priorities. The resulting pipeline will be structured for extensibility, allowing future integration with additional datasets and modeling components for use in other applications. Project outcomes will be shared broadly through technical reports, workshops, and data portals to facilitate adoption by other agencies, research institutions, and industry partners.  Ultimately, this project supports goals of enhancing efficiency, safety, and reliability, while strengthening economic competitiveness and enabling informed, data-driven investment decisions. By combining open-source modeling innovation with public–private collaboration, the project will provide a replicable framework for modern, performance-based transportation system management.  Moreover, the pipeline embraces and deploys advanced and transformative research: using an open-source, agent-based framework (BEAM) exceeds conventional planning methods. The stakeholder-co-development model (with public and industry partners) ensures that this research is not only theoretically innovative but also rooted in real-world deployment potential. This initiative empowers decision-makers to implement policies that enhance safety, the economy, and with various co-benefits to communities. 

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $250,000.00
• Contract Numbers:

  69A3552348329

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

  University Transportation Centers Program
  Department of Transportation
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Managing Organizations:

  Center for Efficient Mobility

  1111 Rellis Parkway
  Bryan, Texas  United States  77807
• Project Managers:

  Ocon, Monica

• Performing Organizations:

  Texas A&M Transportation Institute

  Texas A&M University System
  3135 TAMU
  College Station, TX  United States  77843-3135
• Principal Investigators:

  Khreis, Haneen

• Start Date: 20260301
• Expected Completion Date: 20270831
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers
• Source Data: 03-02-TTI

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Alternatives analysis; Fuel consumption; Mode choice; Stakeholders; Transportation planning; Travel behavior
• Geographic Terms: Austin (Texas)
• Subject Areas: Planning and Forecasting; Transportation (General);

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01981633
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Center for Advancing Research in Transportation Emissions, Energy, and Health (CARTEEH)
• Contract Numbers: 69A3552348329
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: Mar 3 2026 4:42PM