Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technologies offer significant opportunities for state, regional, and local agencies to improve the capacity, reliability, and efficiency of their transportation systems. Quantification of ITS benefits and costs has been to date difficult using the traditional transportation planning process. This is because traditional planning models are not sensitive to many benefits derived from ITS technologies, and because information on the impacts and costs of many ITS technologies is not widely known.

The Federal Highway Administration recognized this potential barrier to integrating ITS into the planning process, and in 1997 initiated a program to develop a tool to help planners better address these issues. Cambridge Systematics, Inc. was selected to lead a team to develop the ITS Deployment Analysis System (IDAS). Assisting the development team was a technical review panel comprised of a number of Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) representatives who provided advice to the team and were involved in the testing of the software. The latest version of the software, IDAS 2.3, was released in November 2003.

The ITS Deployment Analysis System (IDAS) is designed to assist public agencies and consultants in integrating ITS in the transportation planning process. IDAS offers the capability for a systematic assessment of ITS with one analysis tool and is used for determining the benefits and costs of various ITS deployments. IDAS provides users with the following capabilities:

• Comparison and screening of ITS alternatives;
• Estimation of impacts and traveler responses to ITS;
• Estimation of life-cycle costs;
• Inventory of ITS equipment, and identification of cost-sharing opportunities;
• Sensitivity and risk analysis;
• ITS deployment and operations/maintenance scheduling; and,
• Documentation for transition into design and implementation.