TransResAI: A Compound AI System for Coastal Transportation Resilience

Abstract

Coastal flooding increasingly threatens transportation infrastructure, yet the analytical tools needed for resilience management remain difficult for many non-specialist practitioners to use. This study presents TransResAI, a compound AI system that supports analysis of flood-aware transportation resilience via natural-language interactions. The system integrates a locally deployable Large Language Model (LLM) with modules for task decomposition, secure code generation, geospatial analysis, retrieval-augmented generation, and interactive map rendering. TransResAI links MATSim flood-scenario simulation outputs, OpenStreetMap-derived flood-risk networks, equity-focused demographic indicators, and regional documents in Hampton Roads, Virginia. A structured user study with domain experts demonstrated that TransResAI reduced task completion time by 80-88% relative to conventional GIS workflows, compressing analytical tasks from a mean of 197.1 seconds to 29.7 seconds and visualization tasks from 364.0 seconds to 46.1 seconds, while maintaining mean accuracy of 4.60/5.00 and task completion rates exceeding 94%. These findings demonstrate that compound AI architectures bridge the gap between general-purpose language models and specialized domain knowledge, as well as the quantitative rigor required for infrastructure resilience, providing transportation agencies and communities with faster, more accessible analytical tools for decision-making under growing climate uncertainty.