Joshua A. Auld

Joshua A. Auld leads transportation systems and mobility research at Argonne National Laboratory, developing advanced modeling and simulation tools to understand how emerging technologies, infrastructure, policy, and human behavior shape energy use.

Biography

Highlights

Auld is group manager of the Transportation Systems and Mobility Group at Argonne National Laboratory, where he leads multidisciplinary research in transportation systems modeling, future mobility, electrification, and connected and automated vehicles. Auld has played a leading role in developing POLARIS, Argonne’s agent-based transportation modeling platform, and applying advanced simulation to help government agencies and industry partners understand how new technologies and transportation strategies may affect mobility and energy use.

“Transportation is a lot closer to lived experience than a lot of science. We like to say everyone’s an expert in our field because everyone feels it every day.” — Argonne Group Manager Joshua A. Auld

Research Focus

Auld’s research focuses on agent-based transportation systems modeling and the interactions among traveler behavior, transportation technologies, infrastructure and system operations. His work integrates travel demand, traffic networks, vehicle technologies, freight, transit, and emerging mobility services to model complex transportation systems and explore how they may evolve over time and impact key metrics like cost, affordability, convenience and energy use.

Impact

Auld’s work gives transportation planners, policymakers and technology developers tools to evaluate potential changes before they happen at scale. By modeling how millions of individual travelers and vehicles interact with infrastructure, technology and policy, his team explores the potential mobility and energy impacts of technologies such as alternative powertrains, automated vehicles, new mobility modes, and many others, to assess transportation investments and support long-range planning. This systems-level perspective helps decision-makers understand both the opportunities and potential unintended effects of changes to transportation.

Joshua A. Auld is group manager of the Transportation Systems and Mobility Group at Argonne National Laboratory. He specializes in transportation systems modeling, agent-based simulation, travel behavior and intelligent transportation systems, with a focus on understanding how emerging technologies and changing traveler behavior affect mobility and energy use.

Auld earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in transportation engineering from the University of Illinois Chicago. His doctoral research focused on agent-based activity and travel modeling, and his work with regional transportation planners led him to Argonne, where he initially applied his expertise to emergency evacuation and disaster-response modeling.

At Argonne, Auld became a lead developer of POLARIS, an agent-based modeling platform that simulates transportation demand, network operations and energy use. He has helped expand POLARIS into a core mobility analysis tool for the U.S. Department of Energy and leads research examining areas including connected and automated vehicles, multimodal travel, traveler behavior, freight, and interactions among transportation and other energy systems.

His research has supported transportation planning and technology decisions at the federal, state and regional levels. His team has worked with transportation and transit agencies, vehicle manufacturers, mobility providers, universities and other national laboratories. Recent applications include evaluating the regional benefits of public transit in Chicago and examining the potential mobility and energy impacts of emerging vehicle technologies.

As group manager, Auld also focuses on building multidisciplinary research teams and mentoring researchers and students. Drawing on mentorship throughout his own career, he encourages researchers to pursue new ideas, contribute to program development and build the collaborative relationships needed to address increasingly interconnected transportation challenges.

Outside of work, Auld enjoys disc golf, trivia, board games and spending time with his family and dog.

Read the latest Argonne news about JOSHUA A. AULD:

A new approach to transportation: Pairing off-street parking with electric scooters

Argonne teams up with the Civic Infrastructure Collaborative and Millennium Parking Garages to reduce traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions

Argonne takes its modeling show on new roads

Argonne deploys its transportation system model to new metropolitan areas.

Education

Ph.D. in Transportation Engineering — University of Illinois Chicago (2011)
M.S. in Transportation Engineering — University of Illinois Chicago (2007)
B.S. in Structural Engineering — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2002)

Honors and Awards

Impact Argonne Award, For Notable Achievement in Program Development, March 2026.
Impact Argonne Award, For Enhancing Argonne’s Reputation, May 2024.
Impact Argonne Award, For Extraordinary Effort, March 2021.
Impact Argonne Award, For Extraordinary Effort, June 2020.
Best Paper Award at 9^th International Workshop on Agent-based Mobility Traffic and Transportation Models, Methodologies and Applications Conference, 2020.
Best Paper Award at 7^th International Workshop on Agent-based Mobility Traffic and Transportation Models, Methodologies and Applications Conference, 2018.
Best Paper Award at Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Vehicle Technology Society’s 2017 Vehicle Power and Propulsion Conference, 2017.

“The pace of change as we make predictions and forecasts is very quick. Staying on top of it all keeps the field exciting.” — Argonne Group Manager Joshua A. Auld

Select Publications

Acosta, Juan G., Omer Verbas, Taner Cokyasar, et al. “Agent-Based Modeling of Transportation Energy Shifts and Trends: A Case Study of the Chicago Region.” Procedia Computer Science 280 (2026): 598–605.
Auld, Joshua, Natalia Zuniga-Garcia, Paul Waddell, Felipe de Souza, and Dan Loughlin. “Interactions between Climate Policy and Technology-Influenced Travel Behavior: Mitigating Induced Demand from Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control.” Transportation Research Record, 2026, 03611981261437050.
Khan, Nazmul Arefin, and Joshua A. Auld. “Modeling Household-Level Party Composition Behavior for Multiparty Activities: A Random Parameter Nested Logit Modeling Approach.” Transportation Letters 18, no. 4 (2026): 756–70.
Mansour, Charbel, Malo Benoit, Rabih Al Haddad, et al. “Understanding Electric Vehicle Range and Charging Needs: Interactions Between Ambient Temperature, Commute Patterns, and State-of-Charge Usage.” Energies 19, no. 3 (2026): 709.
Mori, Kentaro, Felipe de Souza, Krishna Murthy Gurumurthy, Joshua Auld, and Kara M. Kockelman. “Comparing Delay-, Distance-, and Cordon-Based Congestion Pricing Strategies via Large-Scale Simulation.” Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice 208 (2026): 104959.
Uhm, Hyun-Seop, Abdelrahman Ismael, Natalia Zuniga-Garcia, Olcay Sahin, and Joshua Auld. “Fleet-Mix Electric Vehicle Routing Problem for the E-Commerce Delivery with Limited Off-Hour Delivery Implementation.” Sustainability Analytics and Modeling, 2026, 100067.
Souza, Felipe de, Omer Verbas, Joshua Auld, and Chris MJ Tampere. “A Mesoscopic Link-Transmission-Model Able to Track Individual Vehicles.” Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory 140 (2025): 103088.
Gurumurthy, Krishna Murthy, Kara M. Kockelman, and Joshua Auld. “A System of Shared Autonomous Vehicles for Chicago.” Journal of Transport and Land Use 14, no. 1 (2021): 933–48.
Gurumurthy, Krishna Murthy, Felipe de Souza, Annesha Enam, and Joshua Auld. “Integrating Supply and Demand Perspectives for a Large-Scale Simulation of Shared Autonomous Vehicles.” Transportation Research Record 2674, no. 7 (2020): 181–92.
Auld, Joshua, Vadim Sokolov, and Thomas S. Stephens. “Analysis of the Effects of Connected–Automated Vehicle Technologies on Travel Demand.” Transportation Research Record 2625, no. 1 (2017): 1–8.
Auld, Joshua, Michael Hope, Hubert Ley, Vadim Sokolov, Bo Xu, and Kuilin Zhang. “POLARIS: Agent-Based Modeling Framework Development and Implementation for Integrated Travel Demand and Network and Operations Simulations.” Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies 64 (2016): 101–16.