A flood-planning task that normally takes six minutes in GIS took 46 seconds when a local AI system was allowed to run the workflow.
The system is called TransResAI. Researchers at Old Dominion University built it for Hampton Roads, Virginia, one of the most flood-exposed transport regions in the United States.
That setting matters. Hampton Roads has coastal roads, bridges, tunnels, storm surge, sea-level rise, commuter flows, emergency routes, and vulnerable households layered on top of each other. Every useful planning question cuts across several datasets.
A planner might need to know which road links flood first. Which neighbourhoods lose the most mobility. Which census tracts combine high poverty with high exposure. Which adaptation guidance applies. Which routes need priority treatment.
In a normal workflow, that means opening GIS, loading flood layers, joining road-network data, checking traffic model outputs, adding census indicators, reading policy documents, producing a map, then explaining the answer to people who don’t use GIS.
TransResAI turns that into a text box.
A user can ask it to calculate speed reductions under a flood scenario, or show the areas with the highest mobility loss, etc.
The system then breaks the request into parts:
• location
• metric
• scenario
• operation
• visual output.
It writes code, runs the analysis, retrieves the right data, builds the map, and produces the answer.
The architecture is the interesting part.
The model is connected to MATSim traffic simulation outputs, OpenStreetMap flood-risk networks, census-tract demographic indicators, regional policy documents, and a map-rendering pipeline.
It’s also local. The base model is GPT-OSS:20B, running inside a controlled environment with read-only data, no internet access, whitelisted libraries, bounded memory, process isolation, and full logging.
The results were pretty strong.
Analytical tasks took 29.7 seconds on average. Conventional GIS workflows were estimated at 197.1 seconds.
Visualisation tasks took 46.1 seconds. The manual GIS estimate was 364.0 seconds.
Across all tasks, completion rates were above 94%. Mean accuracy was 4.60 out of 5. The system cut task time by 80 to 88% compared with conventional GIS workflows.
But, that said, the caveat is important. It was just five users is a small study. The manual GIS comparison came from expert estimates rather than a fully timed head-to-head trial.
That said, it's an interesting data point. I find that a big bottleneck is having people who know how to connect different datasets fast enough to support a real planning decision.
Anyway, TransResAI is trying to compress that expertise into an interface ordinary planners can use.
Link to paper:
arxiv.org/pdf/2606.00042