New release dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of signal retiming — the highest-value, most underserved operation in traffic management.

Scottsdale, AZ — Flow Labs today announced the commercial release of Optimus Gen2, the next generation of its AI-powered signal optimization software, Optimus. Optimus Gen2 is built on Prometheus, Flow Labs’ proprietary AI engine, and represents the most significant advancement in how traffic signals are optimized since the introduction of software-based timing tools decades ago.

The Retiming Problem

Signal retiming is one of the single biggest levers a transportation agency has to reduce congestion, improve safety, and maximize the return on existing infrastructure. It is also one of the most complex and resource-intensive tasks in traffic engineering. Traditional retiming projects require large teams of engineers, months of fieldwork and analysis, and significant per-intersection costs that put meaningful network-wide optimization out of reach for most agencies. The result: signals across the country go three to five years or longer between retiming cycles, with years of timing decisions based on a single day’s worth of data.

In between those cycles, traffic patterns shift, new developments generate new demand, and signal performance quietly degrades. Engineers know their timings are aging. They simply don’t have the tools or budgets to keep up.

What Optimus Gen2 Changes

Optimus Gen2 fundamentally changes the economics and speed of signal optimization. What once took teams of engineers months to complete can now be done in minutes. Agencies and engineering firms can optimize signals at a fraction of the traditional cost and effort — enabling retiming at the frequency their networks actually require, not the frequency their budgets have historically allowed.

The new release delivers comprehensive optimization capabilities spanning timing, coordination, and safety — allowing engineers to define their operational objectives and receive data-driven timing plans grounded in real-world traffic conditions. Optimus Gen2 also enables engineers to predict the performance impact of timing changes before they’re implemented, replacing uncertainty with confidence at every step of the retiming process.

Powered by Prometheus

At the core of Optimus Gen2 is Prometheus, a new AI engine developed by Flow Labs that uses advanced transformer architecture to model signal performance across entire transportation networks. Prometheus learns directly from real-world vehicle behavior at massive scale — understanding the complex, interdependent relationships between intersections, corridors, and the drivers who move through them.

The result is a fully automated, data-driven approach to traffic modeling that eliminates the months of manual model building and calibration that have defined signal optimization for decades. Prometheus produces outputs grounded in how traffic actually behaves, not how a textbook says it should.

From Analytics to Decisions

“Everything in traffic signal management comes down to making decisions. And the single biggest decision any agency has to make is what signal timings to run on their network,” said Jatish Patel, CEO of Flow Labs. “We’ve led the way in giving engineers better visibility into how their signals are performing. But visibility alone isn’t enough. Optimus Gen2 goes beyond analytics to give agencies the capability to act on what they see — to make better timing decisions, faster, and at dramatically lower cost.”

Why It Matters Now

Federal and state agencies are under growing pressure to demonstrate return on infrastructure investment and deliver measurable outcomes. Signal retiming consistently ranks among the most cost-effective congestion mitigation strategies available — but only when agencies can execute it at the pace and scale their networks require.

Optimus Gen2 is already in active use by agencies and engineering team across the US and is now available immediately as part of the Flow Platform, alongside Flow Labs’ signal performance monitoring, network-wide alerting, deep diagnostics, and instant before-after analysis tools. Together, they form the industry’s first end-to-end signal management platform — from identifying which signals need attention, to diagnosing why, to generating the optimized timing plan, to proving the result.

About Flow Labs

Flow Labs is a cloud-based traffic analytics and optimization platform that helps transportation agencies and engineering firms monitor, diagnose, and optimize signal performance across their entire networks. Using high-penetration connected vehicle data, the Flow Platform delivers signal performance measures, turning movement counts, travel time analytics, safety diagnostics, and AI-powered signal optimization — without requiring new field hardware. Flow Labs serves state DOTs, metropolitan planning organizations, municipalities, and engineering consultancies across the United States and Canada. For more information, visit www.flowlabs.ai.