Integrated Transportation Information Solutions (ITIS) Corporation is a computer services and software engineering consulting firm, with specialized expertise in the Transportation and Safety sector. Concentrating primarily on State and Local Departments of Transportation (DOT), ITIS Corporation provides a matrix of software tools and services that support a significant portion of the operational work within a DOT.

ITIS Corporation provides comprehensive services related to the planning, management, and deployment of Safety Management and Traffic Records Systems. Over the years we have built a number of different solutions for our customers, becoming experts in working with diverse sources of safety data.

ITIS is fully capable of assisting any DOT or public safety agency with planning and implementing technical improvements to existing traffic safety information systems. ITIS approaches each implementation project using an organizing principal of data lifecycles. We develop strategies at each step in crash data processing in order to use the data appropriately for the benefit of our clients and stakeholders.

Safety Data Lifecycles

• Collection – distributed crash data collection from participating agencies
• Repository – centralized data repositories (record archiving) of crash records and location databases
• Aggregation – analytical data warehouses of crash and related information organized into fast and queryable systems
• Analysis and Reporting – presentation and consumption of data by managers, engineers, policy planners, etc.
• Decision, Engineering and Review – traditional safety engineering applications

We have applied our expertise and consulting services to many of the data lifecycle activities, but the following items are particularly noteworthy.

Location Data Systems

ITIS Corporation is considered the premier development firm for spatial or mapping systems that model crash locations and related transportation data – a necessary aspect in performing proper safety analysis.

ITIS has designed and built a number of systems that combine spatial (GIS) and linear references (LRS) for street locations. These systems allow agencies to properly place crash events (or any other “street locatable” events) within a map context. We have found the key to making the street database interact properly with crash and other time-specific data is to model both the street and crash data with a time or historical component. This system is generically called a temporal or “Historical” LRS; ITIS specializes in managing and developing these applications. By combining this LRS and other technologies, ITIS has developed a crash GeoLocation solution that assists agencies in mapping out crash, citation, and other event data to known geographic locations.

Automated Crash GeoLocation (EGL)

In conjunction with the Nevada Department of Transportation, ITIS has developed an automated crash GeoLocation system which is used to geospatially locate crashes from descriptive information, such as intersection and offset, milepost and offset, street address, or Global Positioning (GPS).

CARE Implementation

ITIS has developed a specialized expertise in implementing the University of Alabama’s Critical Accident Reporting Environment (CARE).This software is perhaps the most advanced and comprehensive analytical software package for safety analysis available in the marketplace. CARE’s most powerful ability is its ‘built-in’ data warehousing capability; it allows for rapid processing of complex analytical queries. CARE can retrieve results in a fraction of the time that normal databases require. CARE has a large array of safety analytical processing tools, is fully integrated with GIS and has collision diagramming capabilities.

Repository and Warehousing

There is a critical distinction between data repositories and data warehouses: A repository indicates a common database location for transactional records (insert, update, delete) and a warehouse is used to store an extract from the repository for aggregating, organizing and querying these static data sets by one or more criteria (time, location, age, sex, etc). Many agencies have tried to implement analytical programs based on standard relational database structures and have encountered severe performance issues; ITIS has the knowledge and experience to avoid these pitfalls. We have developed multiple data repositories using XML and relational data schemas for crash data. We have also created associated, well-organized and high-performance data warehouses for safety analysis. In particular, we know and understand how to include truly useful location information in a data warehouse, so that all crash methods of location measurement (e.g. state, county, jurisdiction, route, segment, mid-block, intersection) can be correlated with other crash data metrics.

SafetyAnalyst Preparation

ITIS can extend an agency’s analytical capabilities with FHWA’s SafetyAnalyst (SA) software tools. We have worked with clients to prepare data and map data types into the SA database. As part of the SA program, ITIS worked with clients to guide and manage a field collection data system (PDA) for surveying intersection infrastructure.

Other

ITIS has participated in implementing systems for many of the data life cycles.

• Field Collection (collision data)
• Application Oversight – ITIS has managed the rollout of a statewide field data collection system for crash and citation reports.
• Web Collection (collision data) – ITIS has built multiple web client systems to enter and validate crash information.This is a good option for reporting agencies that do not have the resources to implement a digital field data collection system.
• Crash Data Repositories (collision data)
• Analytical Warehouse Development (collision and location data) – ITIS has built a number of Oracle data warehouses using tuning and indexing techniques to provide performance databases for safety engineering reporting and analyses.