Background
For over 20 years, SwRI has supported a growing number of states and cities with its suite of ActiveITS Advanced Traffic Management System (ATMS) software. During that time, both traffic management and best computing practices have continued to grow and evolve, but the foundational design of ActiveITS has remained steady. This project was designed to investigate ways to advance the core architecture and design of ActiveITS to replace aging components with modern technology, improve reliability by adopting industry-tested approaches, and enhance developer productivity through use of standard tools over internally-developed frameworks.
Approach
The team’s goal started with identifying several major technological areas where the industry state of the art has overtaken the designs implemented early in the development of ActiveITS. Once determined, the team then researched how these areas have been addressed in other large-scale projects, not just within transportation but across all software disciplines. Once viable options were identified, they were evaluated against each other across a variety of scoring factors to determine the most effective tools and solutions to perform more in-depth analysis on.
With these options identified, the team will turn to selecting metrics to apply to proof-of-concept implementations as compared to the existing ActiveITS implementations. The results gathered from this effort will then be used to both support new clients and to reach out to existing clients to seek support for larger upgrades across existing deployments.
Accomplishments
The largest technological areas identified focused on data storage and data distribution, integration of geographical and map information (GIS), and deployment of the system to cloud environments. Industry-leading tools in these areas were identified, and initial work has begun on proving their utility within ActiveITS.
While much work remains to be done in these areas, results to this point have already sparked significant client interest and active project work, with SwRI being funded to begin full implementation of both data distribution and communication via Kafka and RabbitMQ, as well as deeper integration of GIS technology in both the user interface and underlying data structures of ActiveITS. These efforts, along with the ongoing work of this project, will help position ActiveITS to remain the premiere ATMS in the United States.
Resulting Project Work
Florida Department of Transportation - Kafka / RabbitMQ integration
Florida Department of Transportation - GIS Integration