1 INTRODUCTION
The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office (ITS JPO) has established a National ITS Evaluation Program to determine the impacts of federally funded ITS deployments across the country. The objective of this evaluation program is to document findings from ITS deployments that can be useful to a wide variety of external audiences, including planners, engineers, and managers. The results of these evaluations are intended to assist agencies in planning and implementing future ITS projects by providing information about lessons learned from systems that are already implemented.
One of the projects selected for a national evaluation was the Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority's (CARTA) SmartBus Project. This project involved the application of new technologies across the full spectrum of CARTA's operations:
- Various network technologies were deployed to provide connectivity across CARTA's fixed and mobile assets.
- Technologies were deployed to help automate and modernize many field operations, such as APCs and new bus fare boxes.
- Technologies were deployed to help automate and modernize many back office operations, such as new dispatch and revenue management systems.
- A data warehouse was developed to consolidate data collected during CARTA operations, and reporting tools were created to take advantage of this data warehouse.
Managing a deployment that required the introduction of so many interdependent technologies across the entire range of CARTA operations was challenging and provided many opportunities for failure. There was a risk that a too-rapid introduction of a new technology would negatively impact the simultaneous deployment of a second, dependent technology. Rapid deployment of multiple technologies could also make it difficult for the organization to adapt to the changes. Alternatively, deploying a series of new technologies over a longer period of time could make it more likely that the technologies deployed earlier in the deployment cycle would fail to provide the immediate benefits that would justify its deployment because of the lack of other, supporting technologies. An inability to demonstrate benefits can result in a drop in support for the technology deployment process.
Proving its ability to manage these risks, CARTA has been successfully deploying the SmartBus technologies over a period of 6 years, from 2003 to the present, with most of the deployment now completed. This report describes the technologies being deployed and the systems engineering processes that were used to manage the deployment.
The remainder of this document is organized as follows:
- Section 2 – Background on CARTA and the SmartBus Deployment. This section provides background information on CARTA and the SmartBus project.
- Section 3 – The CARTA Systems Engineering Process. CARTA's experience with ITS can be traced back to 2002, when CARTA applied for and received a grant under the ITS Integration Program. Since that time, the agency has introduced new technologies across its operations, from TVMs for the Incline Railway to maintenance monitoring equipment on most CARTA vehicles. This section of the report describes the systems engineering process used by CARTA as it adopted these technologies. It ends with a section summarizing some of the keys to CARTA's successful deployment program.
- Section 4 – A Case Study of a CARTA ITS Deployment. This section of the report exemplifies the CARTA systems engineering process by describing the experiences during one of CARTA's ITS deployments: the data warehouse.
- Section 5 – Summary and Conclusions. This section provides a summary of the report and highlights the key lessons learned in reviewing the CARTA systems engineering processes.