Innovative Transportation Systems
Combining world-class talent, facilities, and leadership to deliver foundational scientific research and robust engineering solutions addressing the nation’s mobility system needs.
About Innovative Transportation Systems
Berkeley Lab’s transportation research advances safe, efficient, and optimized mobility through cutting-edge modeling, automation, artificial intelligence, and health-focused analysis. Working across disciplines, we develop tools and analyses based on real-world data to improve transportation system performance, optimize autonomous and connected vehicle performance, and understand impacts on ease of travel, affordability, energy, and health. And our non-road team, which spans across rail, aviation, and off-road technologies, conducts research that integrates infrastructure, fuel, and grid planning across multiple modes to enhance resilience to supply chain disruptions, reduce overall transportation costs, and achieve economies of scale. Learn more about our broader transportation research portfolio at transportation.lbl.gov.
Tools for Transportation Planning and Analysis
Berkeley Lab develops advanced transportation planning and analysis tools that integrate real-world mobility data, behavioral modeling, and high-performance computing to evaluate emerging mobility technologies and infrastructure strategies. These tools support data-driven decision-making by enabling scenario analysis, system-level simulations, and techno-economic assessments across regional and national scales.
Artificial Intelligence & High-Performance Computing
By combining artificial intelligence, agent-based modeling, and high-performance computing, our research analyzes reliability, congestion, energy use, and human impacts at regional and urban scales by turning massive datasets into actionable planning and operational insights.
Health Impacts from Traffic-Related Air Pollution
We integrate travel demand modeling, emissions estimation, dispersion modeling, and exposure science to quantify how transportation decisions affect air quality and population health to help translate policy scenarios into measurable changes in PM2.5, NO₂, mortality, and morbidity.
Vehicle Connectivity & Autonomy
As transportation becomes connected and increasingly automated, Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley develop vehicle-to-everything (V2X) tools, traffic modeling systems, and adaptive control algorithms that enhance vehicle coordination, reduce congestion, improve fuel efficiency, and enable safer, more resilient transportation networks