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U.S. DOT FY 2026 Phase I Pre-Solicitation Q&A



This U.S. DOT Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Pre-solicitation Q&A Forum provides small businesses an opportunity to submit clarifying questions on the topics published in the U.S. DOT Fiscal Year (FY) 2026 Phase I Pre-Solicitation. Questions will be answered by the Technical Experts/Topic Authors at the U.S. DOT Operating Administrations during this period. Questions shall be limited to improving the understanding of a particular topic's requirements and should not share proposal ideas nor proprietary information.

The U.S. DOT’s FY 2026 Pre-Solicitation period is April 29, 2026, through May 29, 2026, at 5:00 pm Eastern Time (ET). Only questions posted within this period will be responded to.

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13 results found

  1. Commercial Readiness Assessment — are signed LOIs expected from partners?

    For the Commercial and Implementation Readiness Assessment, what level of partner engagement are you expecting? Signed LOIs from state DOTs or MPOs, or is earlier-stage interest enough?

    1 vote

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  2. Data integration plan — strategy document or working ingest pipelines?

    Is this more of a strategy document, or do you want to see working ingest pipelines for at least some of the data sources by the end?

    1 vote

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  3. Digital twin expectation — microsimulation, generative AI, or existing platform integration?

    For the digital twin piece — are you thinking more along the lines of physics-based microsimulation (Aimsun, SUMO, Vissim), or a generative AI model trained on real corridor traces? And is the program open to building on top of an existing digital-twin platform, or would you rather see something built from scratch?

    1 vote

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  4. Priority among data sources, and are licensed feeds (NPMRDS, ATRI) government-furnished?

    Is there a priority order on the data sources? We're weighing NPMRDS, ATRI, state WIM, FAF, TPIMS, and connected vehicle BSMs, and it'd help to know which ones the program sees as most important. Also, for the licensed ones like NPMRDS and ATRI — are those typically furnished to awardees, or should we plan to budget for them?

    1 vote

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  5. Clarification on 80% accuracy target — spatial unit and error metric?

    Quick clarification on the 80% accuracy target for 30–60 minute forecasts — is that measured at the segment level, at specific bottlenecks, or across full origin-destination pairs? And what error metric are you using? Whether it's MAPE on travel time vs. classification accuracy on a congestion label changes the modeling approach quite a bit.

    1 vote

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  6. 1 vote

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  7. 1 vote

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  8. 1 vote

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  9. 1 vote

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  10. 1 vote

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  11. 1 vote

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  12. 1 vote

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  13. 1 vote

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