The Client

The Multimodal Planning Division (MPD) of the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT)

The Background:

In mid-2018, the Multimodal Planning Division of ADOT set out to conduct an organization-wide data review to improve data processes and quality, support data integration and to produce a collection of authoritative dashboards. Gistic Research and sub-contractors from Works Consulting and Kingston Business Solutions were contracted to execute this plan.

The Challenge

The team quickly realized the following key challenges that had resulted in the failure of a high-profile asset visualization and analysis
project.

+ Authoritative Data and Specifications,

+ Sustainable Process Architecture,

+ Performance of the Visualization Platform,

+ Multi-dimensional Analysis, and

+ Intuitive, User-Friendly Experience.

How Gistic Helped

Initiating the project, the team conducted interviews with various business units having data systems interacting with the Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS) and GIS data maintained at MPD. This insight prepared the team to meet the challenges and shaped the execution of the visualizations.

Figure 1

+ Authoritative

Identifying the recognized voice of authority in data was critical. The team agreed that the submitted versions of HPMS and National Bridge Inventory (NBI) datasets should be the authoritative datasets for the dashboards. The team further decided to convey this authority by capturing/publishing metadata, along with building QA/QC in the data pipelines.

+ Sustainable

Central to the sustainability of the dashboards are the data pipelines ensuring the flow of data from the sources to the Data Mart, as shown in Figure 1 . The FME/SQL-based pipelines can be refreshed at desired intervals to ensure the data is up to date.

+ Performance

Significant effort was made to explore the strategies in enhancing the performance of the dashboards, such as table index, data denormalization, pre-aggregation, spatial geometry generalization, and reduction of coordinate precision, etc.  The team believed that RDBMS-based datamart afforded more options for performance enhancements.

+ Multi-dimensional

Supporting multi-dimensional LRS data (HPMS) drill-down is especially hard when on-the-fly summarizing data by different are types, such as various political/administrative boundaries as well as engineering/maintenance districts, is requested. The project team leverage Gistic’s LRS-based ETL tools in building the live pipelines.

The temporal dimension was added through loading multiple years of HPMS/NBI submittals.

+ Intuitive

The team built two HPMS dashboards to meet the needs of Executives/Public and Analyst (Planners/Engineers). For the Executive version, we focused on the big picture summarization with a simplified user interface. The Analyst version exposed more dimensions that allowed planners and engineers to see, for example, Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) between milepost 40 and 50 on I-10 in the cardinal direction.

The Result

Figure 2 and 3 are screenshots of ADOT’s HPMS dashboards for executives and Analysts, respectively. Interested readers may learn more about the dashboard on the LinearBench® YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/LinearBench

Figure 2

Figure 3

Technologies

The following technologies were utilized in the Data Review and Visualization project:

+ Tableau for dashboard construction and publishing

+ ArcGIS for maintenance and capture of spatial data

+ FME and MsSQL Server for ETL pipelines

+ MS Excel for metadata capture and maintenance

Why Gistic?

Gistic Research is known for its expertise in LRS data integration and visualization. For more information about this project please contact:

ADOT: James Meyer jmeyer@azdot.gov
Gistic Research, Inc: Bo Guo bo.guo@gisticinc.com