By Charles O’Hara, GeoResources Institute, Engineering Research Center, Mississippi State University (www.erc.msstate.edu), Mississippi State, Miss., and Lonnie P. Hearne, SimWright Inc. (www.simwright.com), Middle Tennessee Office, Franklin, Tenn.

The NCRST-E research will build on past success and involve selected on-the-ground transportation corridor projects and strategic partnerships with industry partners and state DoT practitioners. The NCRST-E team of researchers and partners will work closely with data providers, consultants, commercial off-the-shelf software companies, industry planners and practitioners, and DOT project managers to deploy remote sensing and spatial information technology solutions to help streamline environmental impact assessment processes and related transportation corridor planning tasks.

Proposed Project Areas
A typical transportation corridor project may last 10 to 20 years. NCRST-E has selected actual on-the-ground transportation projects across the Southeast United States that are of various scopes and at different stages in their project life cycles. This illustrates the important point that remote sensing and spatial information technologies offer methods that improve tasks in most or all stages of the transportation corridor planning process.

NCRST-E has selected regions and transportation projects to demonstrate methods that effectively integrate remote sensing and spatial information technologies. The consortium’s involvement will benefit existing projects by providing participation and added resources to advance planning processes that in some cases have slowed or stalled due to actual or perceived planning or environmental problems. By developing and sharing vital remote sensing and spatial information data, technologies and information products among multiple projects and practitioners, this effort will demonstrate the importance of regional databases for transportation corridor planning and environmental impact assessment processes. The proposed on-the-ground corridor projects are presented above.

Project Tasks and Approach
The overall project is divided into two phases. The first phase will be a requirements definition phase during which data acquisition/integration needs will be defined. Although the overall transportation planning process is somewhat generic, individual regions have specific needs and problems. During the first phase, stakeholder “pain elements” will be cataloged to ensure that pilot implementations address stakeholder problems and issues. Project tasks are defined at left.

Current remote sensing and spatial information technology that can be used in an enhanced transportation corridor planning process have been developed and used in piece-meal planning processes in various streamlining pilot projects across the nation. This tends to yield standalone tools, analysis environments and data management approaches that have resulted in stovepipe solutions rather than the highly integrated, data-driven planning processes needed to improve transportation decision making and the timeliness of project delivery.

To overcome the limitations of stovepipe solutions, a “best-of-breed” or industry standard set of data sources, technology solutions, industry partners and fundamental tools have been selected to be extended and integrated into the proposed enterprise decision-support framework. A complete list of these tools and data, along with their providers’ contact information, appears above. Each solution selected is at a technology readiness level that will enable the full deployment of proposed services through the successful completion of project objectives.

Architecture and software technologies will be deployed to provide integrated and interoperable mapping services, feature extraction and analysis environments. Advanced data sources will be deployed along with technologies to extract data products and information that are needed for mapping analysis and decision-support processes. Approaches that integrate various types of data and information to enhance decision-making processes have shown their value in past efforts and will be significantly built upon in planned research activities (Figure 2).

In addition to developing tools that directly impact and enhance transportation corridor planning processes, specific tools are needed to provide smart services. The need for smart services tools has been identified for remote sensing and spatial information data management, land ownership information management, application streamlining analysis and core smart services—those that should be incorporated in all tools and applications for measuring and benchmarking process performance.
 

Project Status
The Joint Program Oversight Committee approved the NCRST-E research project in October 2003. The project, led by Mississippi State University, will involve an extensive set of industry, data provider, agency and software provider partners. A series of scoping meetings have been conducted to plan and outline the participation of all partners.

Work is currently in progress at MSU to implement the database structure of the enterprise architecture. Team members are in the process of identifying and contacting stakeholders to apprise them of the project and to begin identifying what data may be available and what political and engineering issues may arise when the attempt is made to integrate the datasets.
 

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