BEAM was developed under the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE's) Smart Mobility Consortium to simulate the implications of three transformative trends on transportation patterns and energy use: vehicle sharing, electrification, and automation. Berkeley researchers have expanded conventional travel demand models, which focus on privately owned vehicles, to include transit vehicles, on-demand ride-hailing (for example, Lyft and Uber) vehicles, and micromobiity (shared bikes and e-scooters) services. It will eventually cover freight and goods delivery vehicles.

BEAM is a mesoscopic travel activity model that simulates the hourly travel of individual agents in a metropolitan region. Based on the open-source Multi-Agent Transport Simulation (MATSim) platform, BEAM runs on high-performance computing resources to enable fast simulations of entire regions.  In BEAM, individual travelers can choose from multiple travel modes and multimodal trips to select an option that best meets their preferences for cost, departure/arrival time, and trip duration. (For example, traveling from home to work, one might select scooter, public transportation, and walk.) Researchers then adjust the relative cost, availability, and frequency of different modes and vehicle drivetrain technologies to estimate vehicle or personal miles of travel, congestion, and energy use of a regional transportation system under different scenarios.

To view webinar slides about a project using BEAM, see: Applying the Beam Smart Mobility Workflow to San Francisco Modeling Integrated Mesoscale Urban Systems with the Beam Model

The diagram below shows the macroscopic model structure designed for the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). Residents can travel within their home geotype and to and from other geotypes. Within each geotype, the multimodal transportation system’s performance is modeled to account for dynamic demand response.

Researchers construct these geotypes using a multi-stage clustering process that considers the neighborhood-level built environment and population characteristics as well as the spatial arrangement of these different types of neighborhoods. Berkeley Lab has used these geotypes to construct a macroscopic model of multimodal transportation supply and demand equilibrium, allowing fast national-scale analysis of potential changes to the transportation such as the re-allocation of right-of-way to certain modes, new pricing schemes, or the arrival of new modes of travel.

The SMART Mobility Consortium is a project of the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Vehicle Technologies Office under their Energy Efficient Mobility Systems (EEMS) Program.

This multi-year, multi-laboratory collaborative is dedicated to further understanding the energy implications and opportunities of advanced mobility solutions. Berkeley Lab researchers join colleagues from the Argonne, Idaho, and Oak Ridge national labs, and from the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL).

EEMS work operates in a continuous feedback loop between research and development (R&D), analysis and modeling, and real-world living labs. R&D activities are focused on scalable smart mobility projects that identify system-level opportunities to significantly increase the energy efficiency of the movement of people and goods. The consortium aims to deliver new EEMS data, analysis, and modeling tools, and create new knowledge to support smarter mobility systems. Living labs projects demonstrate and assess the return on investment of mobility systems that reduce energy consumption while delivering the benefits of new mobility technology and provide critical real-world data to inform EEMS R&D efforts. EEMS also coordinates with other programs within the Department of Energy such as Clean Cities, and Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), as well as the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Commerce.

The FHWA plays a key leadership role in sponsoring, sustaining, and guiding highway research. As a leader in the transportation research and technology (R&T) field, FHWA is working to improve its R&T program and to deploy innovations and technologies

The Research and Technology Program strives to generate new solutions, build more effective partnerships, and provide better information and tools for decision making, which will enable the Nation to enhance and make the best investments in the U.S. transportation system.

Research topics are listed on the FHWA website on the "Research Technology and Innovation Deployment" page.

ITS addresses challenges in our transportation systems, including safety, energy consumption, an aging infrastructure, and a lack of reliability, resilience, and sustainability. Spanning nine departments and four colleges within UC Berkeley and two divisions at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ITS is a unique environment where the entire pipeline from science and technology inception to deployment can be brought to bear on these challenges, working directly with transportation practitioners and the worlds of policy and governance in which they must function.

ITS researchers work in a wide range of fields, including robotics and machine learning, behavioral economics, policy, and urban planning. To effectively harness that expertise, our plan for the future focuses on four growth areas that will allow us to advance the knowledge base in key fields such as self-driving cars, airspace governance for the coming drone revolution, and a clean-energy infrastructure. With our mission of service to the State of California, and with our San Francisco Bay Area location — ground zero for the extraordinary, data-rich, technologically advanced era in which we live — ITS aims to be the inventor of the smart cities of tomorrow, contributing to an always-more-efficient and sustainable transportation system.