The DOT AI and data surface
The U.S. Department of Transportation is one of the most data-rich federal departments outside Defense and Intelligence. Across its modal administrations, DOT collects — and must make sense of — traffic counts, crash records, flight trajectories, rail incident data, transit ridership, freight movement, pipeline telemetry, and increasingly sensor-derived data from connected and autonomous vehicles. The gap between data collected and decisions enabled is where AI and ML deliver value, and where DOT program offices are actively procuring.
Precision Delivery Federal LLC (UEI Y2JVCZXT9HP5, CAGE 1AYQ0, NAICS 541512) is positioned as a SAM-registered small business specializing in AI/ML and data engineering for transportation mission work. We don't build vehicles or air traffic control towers; we build the data infrastructure, ML models, and decision-support tooling that make federal transportation missions safer, faster, and more auditable.
Modal administrations we target
- Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) — Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS), traffic analytics, bridge inventory (NBI), pavement condition ML, digital twin infrastructure. FHWA is a heavy data customer.
- Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) — NextGen ATM, SWIM data, surface surveillance (ASDE-X), trajectory prediction, weather-integrated optimization, UAS integration, safety analytics on ASRS and NTSB data.
- National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) — Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), Crash Investigation Sampling System (CISS), ADAS incident data, autonomous vehicle incident reporting under the Standing General Order.
- Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) — incident data, Positive Train Control analytics, rail safety ML.
- Federal Transit Administration (FTA) — National Transit Database, ridership ML, transit asset management, Safe Streets coordination.
- PHMSA, MARAD, FMCSA — pipeline integrity, maritime logistics, motor carrier safety analytics.
- Office of the Secretary (OST-R) — via Volpe National Transportation Systems Center and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the research and data backbone of DOT.
Autonomous systems — the data layer, not the vehicle
Autonomous vehicles, driver-assistance systems, and UAS integration dominate the transportation AI conversation. DOT's role is not to build the vehicles — it is to set safety standards and validate them against evidence. That generates a substantial federal data-and-evaluation workload that is a direct fit for us:
- Crash and incident data ingestion — pipelines that normalize reports from OEMs, law enforcement, and state DOTs into analyzable corpora.
- Scenario mining — ML over incident narratives to extract safety-relevant scenarios for testing and policy.
- Perception and sensor fusion evaluation — independent evaluation harnesses for perception model claims.
- Standing General Order analytics — NHTSA's ongoing collection of ADS and Level 2 incident data generates ML opportunities in triage, anomaly detection, and trend analysis.
FAA NextGen and air traffic AI
FAA's modernization roadmap — NextGen, the Operational Concept for ATM, trajectory-based operations — produces some of the most demanding real-time ML workloads in the federal space. Our fit:
- Trajectory prediction ML on ADS-B and SWIM data for 4D-trajectory-based operations.
- Surface surveillance optimization — ML-assisted departure and taxi management.
- Weather-integrated optimization — fusing NWS products with traffic management for collaborative decision making.
- Safety reporting — LLM-assisted triage of ASRS narratives, cross-referencing NTSB data, surfacing precursor patterns.
- UAS integration — data infrastructure for BVLOS operations, waiver analytics, remote ID pilots.
IIJA / BIL-funded modernization
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act created sustained funding for DOT modernization programs where data infrastructure is baseline:
- SMART grants — Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation — explicitly seed data-driven pilots in state and local DOTs; federal oversight creates a data-harmonization workload.
- Safe Streets for All — vision zero-style analytics, demographic and crash-data ML.
- Bridge and highway formula programs — inventory, inspection, and condition ML.
- National EV Infrastructure (NEVI) — telemetry, reliability analytics, demand forecasting.
Capabilities mapped to DOT priorities
- Data Engineering — lakehouse architectures for crash, traffic, and trajectory data. Schema governance across modal administrations. Real-time streaming for operational data.
- Machine Learning — time-series for trajectory and traffic, computer vision for pavement and bridge inspection imagery, NLP for incident narratives, anomaly detection.
- Agentic AI — LLM tooling for safety report triage, scenario extraction, regulatory analysis. Every agent step logged and governed.
- Cloud Infrastructure — AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, FedRAMP Moderate-aligned reference architectures.
- DevSecOps — STIG compliance, 800-53 control mapping, continuous monitoring.
DOT SBIR
DOT runs a Department-level SBIR program coordinated across modal administrations. Topics favor practical, field-deployable, ready-to-scale solutions — exactly the profile small AI-focused firms can win. With SBIR reauthorized through September 30, 2031 under the April 2026 law, and Strategic Breakthrough Phase II available to larger-spend agencies, DOT SBIR is a meaningful channel for us.
Past performance and honest positioning
Our confirmed federal past performance is at SAMHSA (HHS) — production ML, full ATO, real federal users. For DOT specifically, we are targeting and pursuing work via SBIR, subcontractor roles with DOT primes (large modernization IDIQs all carry small business subcontracting requirements), and partnerships through the Volpe Center research ecosystem.
Vehicles and NAICS
- Primary NAICS 541512. Adjacent: 541511, 541519, 541690, 541370 (Surveying and Mapping), 541715 (R&D).
- Vehicles — DOT SBIR, GSA MAS task orders, modal administration IDIQs (FAA's FEAT, FHWA's research task-order vehicles), OTAs via DOT partners.
If you are a DOT program office or a prime on a DOT IDIQ looking for an AI/ML-specialized small business subcontractor, email [email protected].