The procurement of ITS equipment can be a difficult undertaking. Trevilon offers consulting services in the acquisition of ITS equipment that leverages our expertise and knowledge of ITS standards. We can assist you in the development of your concept of operations and functional requirements so that we can properly derive the detailed specification required for your equipment.

Trevilon offers ITS system design, development and review services. Even simple ITS systems can be quite complex. In order to ensure that a proposed system will properly meet the user expectations, it is critical that the project successfully link the transportation engineer (the end user of the delivered system) and the systems engineers who are responsible for delivering the system. All of our technical staff members are trained in the latest technologies using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) in order to make this linking possible with the highest assurance that user requirements are not lost in the process. A key aspect of this process is to ensure that the user is able to review the development of the system throughout the effort.

This process can be used in a variety of ways, including:

• To develop a preliminary design
• As a basis for designing a building a system
• To perform independent validation and verification of systems
• To perform system testing

Based largely on the input of Trevilon, UML is now being used as a critical component of many of the ITS Standards efforts. The benefits of using this approach are demonstrated by the improved quality of standards that include the systems engineering content, including:

• A better description and documentation of the user needs
• A clearer definition of the precise requirements for implementation
• An unambiguous definition of the sequence of events that must occur in order to fulfill a user need
• A clear definition of the traceability among the different sections of the standard, thereby simplifying the procurement process

Unified Modeling Language (UML)

A transportation engineer would never construct a bridge or other piece of physical infrastructure without first developing a design, including blueprints and a specification, and ensuring that an inspection process was in place. Yet many ITS systems have documentation that are so deficient that the next system integrator is unable to follow the system design, let alone having the user be able to verify the design. UML provides the tools necessary to enable a similar set of design and inspection capabilities to which many transportation engineers are already accustomed.

UML is a graphical language that presents the overall design of the system, including the logical design of data and memory structures (e.g., equivalent to the physical layout of a bridge) and the design of how the system operates (e.g., the equivalent to how the traffic flows over a bridge). The process allows a thorough examination of a system by making design flaws more easily identifiable. It is the equivalent to a blueprint in construction projects. Unfortunately, all too often, this sort of documentation is never produced for systems projects. As a result, the final software package is often delivered behind schedule, over-budget, and still does not meet the user expectations.

The iterative and incremental process that UML provides, allows for the pieces of the whole to be broken down in smaller slices or mini-projects. Each "mini-project" is an iteration that results in an increment. By properly managing software and system development through the iterative approach, you can reduce the risk to expenditures on a single increment. This also allows flaws to be detected early before significant resources have been expended. For more information on UML, link to http://www.omg.org.