09-16-2024

Optimize Infrastructure Success By Always Keeping The End In Mind

In today’s fast-paced world, the demand for efficient and sustainable transportation infrastructure is more pressing than ever. As urbanization accelerates and technological advancements reshape our cities, integrated infrastructure solutions become paramount to realizing outcomes around safety, mobility, and travel time reliability.

Systems Integration Mindset

Organizations can maximize roadway value across all project delivery stages—from planning and design to construction, operations, and maintenance—by developing a comprehensive integrated data environment strategy with a Systems Integration Mindset.

This mindset is focused on a user-centric framework, considering the needs of various personas and use cases throughout every stage of a project—from identifying the need for infrastructure work to the final implementation. By developing personas, public sector staff, operators, managers, and partner agencies can collectively create a foundation that addresses individual needs and ensures a safe, reliable experience for all. Whether it’s monitoring real-time systems or determining future funding, an integrated systems approach is crucial to meeting the needs of diverse personas and ensuring the success of transportation projects.

Planning: The Foundation of Success

Efficient planning is essential for any successful transportation infrastructure project. By understanding the unique needs and developing a strategic roadmap, city planners and transportation leaders can address their many challenges, such as growing congestion, road safety, aging infrastructure, meeting sustainability objectives, interagency coordination, and securing transportation systems. This work often begins with developing personas and use cases, while keeping the end state in mind from the beginning, which is the first step of the Systems Integration Mindset.

Detailed implementation plans also serve as a roadmap for agencies setting up their Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) architecture to ensure they’re in compliance with industry standards when planning transportation system management and operations (TISMO) strategies. Developing an ITS program from scratch requires meticulous planning that can result in significant improvements in traffic management and safety.

For instance, Parsons’ work with Lake County, Illinois, exemplifies how meticulous planning can lead to award-winning outcomes. By helping Lake County stand up their ITS program and creating an implementation phasing plan, we ensured a clear path forward for ten years. This detailed planning resulted in nine different awards for Lake County’s ITS infrastructure.

Design: Integrating Cutting-Edge Technology

The next step is design—where innovation meets practicality and cutting-edge technology is integrated into transportation infrastructure. This crucial stage benefits from the Systems Integration Mindset by finding practical, implementable traffic management center (TMC) solutions that consider every user persona.

Over the past decade, our transportation experts have completed more than 65 TMC design, integration, and operation projects, including assessments of existing operations and technology. Whether a project involves new site development, deployment, or installation, utilizing consistent, proven strategies for project execution ensures that every project is successful and meets or exceeds the key performance indicators established at the start.

In 2014, Parsons developed the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) guidelines for virtual transportation management centers, positioning us at the national forefront of the TMC design and technology evolution. We have implemented state-of-the-art transportation management centers that serve critical operational functions, including incident management, event management, and emergency response management.

Construction: Ensuring Efficiency And Safety

The construction phase brings designs to life but can present challenges that require meticulous management if baseline connectivity and tools that enable communication and information sharing between contractors, public sector staff, consultants, and the public aren’t present. These tools are key components of the Systems Integration Mindset.

In the world of roadway construction management, broadband infrastructure deployment plays a crucial role. From real-time data and communication to remote monitoring and maintenance, broadband connectivity enables construction teams to work more efficiently and effectively. With access to high-speed internet, project managers can gather data and collaborate with team members in real time, making it easier to identify and address issues as they arise. Additionally, remote monitoring and maintenance tools can help keep construction projects on track and ensure they are completed on time and within budget. As the country continues to invest in transportation infrastructure, we need to acknowledge broadband connectivity is a crucial component in the success of these projects and continue to advocate for broadband at the federal level.

From work zone lane closure permit management to field inspections, a thoughtful application of technology assists with coordinating multiple contractors, agencies, and testing documentation. For example, our work zone lane closure permit management system has successfully streamlined the process of coordinating and scheduling road work for the Ministry of Transportation in Ontario. This fully scalable web-based solution has been in operation for 12 years and is used by hundreds of ministry staff, contractors, and consultants daily. With thousands of transactions every construction season, this system has proven to be a critical tool for integrated and coordinated work zone management, ensuring that projects are completed safely, efficiently, and on time.

Operations & Maintenance: Sustaining Long-Term Value

The final stage—operations and maintenance—is where long-term value is realized through sustained performance optimization strategies tailored specifically for each project’s needs. In general, operations and maintenance are the realization of the Systems Integration Mindset, where the overall systems and user-focused approach delivers a successful project from day one and into the future.

Advanced ITS solutions, such as our smart mobility platform, iNET®, play a pivotal role in this stage. Using data from a variety of sources, iNET creates an integrated data environment with a “single pane of glass” view to facilitate proactive maintenance measures and responsive traffic management. This systems integration solution helps reduce congestion and improve safety while integrating seamlessly into existing systems to ensure maximum efficiency and enhanced situational awareness for operators, managers, and users.

The City of Dubuque, Iowa is a great example of how iNET® can be tailored to enhance collaboration in the city and the region. Dubuque is not a large city but is experiencing what many larger cities experience: congestion. To address this issue, we are utilizing iNET® to deliver real-time modeling of the city’s traffic network to determine the best traffic mitigation plan at any given time based on real-time traffic data. iNET® also provides travel times throughout the city to help motorists determine the best route to take in unusual conditions. Our integrated approach ensures seamless operation and management of roadway incidents to help Dubuque manage traffic throughout the city.

Success with An Integrated Approach

The transportation industry is rapidly evolving, and transportation infrastructure is critical to a city or region’s success. By implementing an integrated approach that encompasses all project delivery stages, we can achieve optimized roadways. To do this, public sector agencies and their supporting consultants need to adopt a Systems Integration Mindset at every project stage. Realization of this adoption will be seen by the network effect, where every user has what they need when it’s needed, and the system itself is more valuable than the sum of users benefit collectively. By leveraging cutting-edge technology and advanced ITS solutions, we can create a smarter, safer, and more sustainable future for transportation infrastructure.

About The Author

Emily Silverman leads projects in the built environment for advanced mobility, connected vehicles, and intelligent transportation systems to bridge the digital divide and community engagement. Current efforts include innovations around signal performance, systems integration to improve situational awareness and management, and regional data flow. In addition, Emily contributes to research and development for iNET®, Parsons Advanced Transportation Management System. Previously, she developed and deployed Denver’s Smart City Program where she was tasked with embracing and testing new and better ways to deploy technology and use data to improve the everyday experience of living in Denver.

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