Intelligent Transportation Systems Deployment Analysis System

The ITS Deployment Analysis System (IDAS) is software developed by the Federal Highway Administration that can be used in planning for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) deployments. State, regional, and local planners can use IDAS to estimate the benefits and costs of ITS investments – which are either alternatives to or enhancements of traditional highway and transit infrastructure. IDAS can currently predict relative costs and benefits for more than 60 types of ITS investments. Practitioners will find a number of useful features that enhance ITS planning. For example, IDAS:

  • Works with the output of existing transportation planning models;
  • Compares and screens ITS deployment alternatives;
  • Estimates the impacts and traveler responses to ITS;
  • Develops inventories of ITS equipment needed for proposed deployments and identifies cost sharing opportunities;
  • Estimates life-cycle costs including capital and O&M costs for the public and private sectors;
  • Provides documentation for transition into design and implementation.

IDAS was developed by a team led by Cambridge Systematics under the technical guidance of a steering committee comprised of representatives from a variety of Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs). The IDAS software may be purchased through the McTrans Center.

Updated IDAS Equipment Costs Spreadsheet Now Available

The IDAS cost module utilizes a database of equipment unit costs to estimate the lifecycle costs of the deployments included in any ITS alternative created by the user. Since the initial development, the IDAS unit cost figures have been updated to remain consistent with the cost figures maintained in the U.S. DOT’s ITS Joint Program Office’s (ITS JPO) ITS Costs Database http://www.itscosts.its.dot.gov . In 2003, a major effort was undertaken to comprehensively update all the unit cost figures in the ITS JPO’s cost database to represents the 2003 price of the equipment, presented in year 2003 dollars. A subsequent effort was undertaken to prepare these updated unit costs for use in IDAS and maintain the consistency of the IDAS costs figures with the ITS JPO cost figures since the current version of IDAS (Version 2.3) still performs its analysis based on costs figures presented in 1995 dollars.

The spreadsheet available here, contains the updated cost figures presented in 1995 dollars ready for import into IDAS. The user may import this spreadsheet into IDAS to update the default unit cost values in the IDAS database for all future analysis conducted within this database. Please note: the updated unit cost figures will not be retroactively applied to previously created databases or deployments. The user will also need to complete the import process for any additional, or any newly created, databases in which they wish to use the updated cost figures. The decision to update or not update these unit cost figures is at the discretion of individual users. Although many of the cost elements were not significantly changed in this update, the user should be aware that some cost elements are significantly different, in some cases by more than 30 percent. Additional information on the updated cost values and how to implement can be obtained from this document.

 

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