Working on behalf of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), the California Department of Technology (CDT) has released an RFP seeking bidder response for Transportation System Network (TSN) Replacement. The RFP went out April 28 and is in early stages with pre-solicitation feedback due May 18. Find Part 1 and Part 2 here. The state will hold confidential meetings with potential bidders June 1-5, though amid the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, it’s unclear what format those meetings will take. The solicitation will be released Sept. 2; intents to bid and questions are due Sept. 17 and proposals are due Oct. 15. Negotiation invitations go out Oct. 30; negotiations will take place Nov. 2-Nov. 13; and the contract will be awarded Dec. 23. The initial contract term will be four years with an option for the state to make two one-year extensions. The contract’s estimated value is not specified. Among the takeaways:
• This project will replace a deeply significant system at a linchpin state agency. The current, legacy TSN, the agencies said in the RFP, is an enterprise Oracle application developed in the 1990s and jointly maintained by Caltrans’ divisions of Research, Innovation and System Information; Traffic Operations and IT. Its four modules -- highway inventory data, traffic census/volumes, collision data, and traffic investigation reports – let the agency maintain and link traffic census, collision, and highway inventory data across the state-owned highway system. It is, the agencies said, Caltrans’ “primary information system” for managing data and doing calculations to make the State Highway System safer; and is used as the “source system of record” by many other Caltrans’ offices.
Per the RFP: “The Legacy TSN is the base information system for all traffic safety analysis and investigations required by the Highway Safety Improvement Program, and also supports other federally mandated programs” such as the Highway Performance Monitoring System, Traffic Census and Pavement.
• The new TSN will help Caltrans comply with Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) mandates including Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21), and the Fixing America's Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, by 2023. It will replace a system nearing end-of-life, one which lacks the geospatial capabilities needed to meet current federal mandates, doesn’t satisfy “other current state and department needs”; doesn’t offer “easy to use query and export capabilities: and requires expert assistance to use in “contemporary business intelligence (BI) tools requires expert assistance.”
In order to meet those federal regulatory requirements, the new TSN will need capabilities including using Caltrans’ GIS-based Linear Referencing System now being implemented in Esri Roads and Highways software, as its spatial data framework. It will need to offer “modern GIS map interfaces and geospatial capabilities for query and data exploration”; provide geolocation functions to support “entry and edit of highway characteristics, collisions, traffic volumes, and investigations”; and “extend its information management storage and capabilities … to the local roadway network,” to include data for all the state’s public roadways.
• Caltrans’ new TSN should expand on its legacy system but remain “highly integrated”; and enable the entire cycle of safety analysis, from diagnosis to selecting countermeasures; doing an economical appraisal; prioritizing projects; evaluating safety effectiveness; and network screening. Its three primary elements will be source systems of record, with “user interfaces/user experiences (UI/UX),” each paired with a data store; an “authoritative reporting system” containing quality-controlled records from those source systems; and APIs, procedure calls and “mechanisms” to coordinate the messaging between the UI/UX elements and users and methods that populate the reporting system.
“The New TSN shall be modern and forward-leaning and built in a way that will allow for future enhancements and flexibility to integrate new technologies, capabilities and transportation data sources,” the RFP said, indicating Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR), big data, connected and automated vehicles (CAV) data and Internet-of-Things data as examples.
• Bidders must have a range of experience including at least three years in integrating “large-scale and complex application architecture in a government data center” and on transportation products either directly or working with industry experts. They must have designed and implemented transportation databases or warehouse systems; and roadway safety analysis tools or software that implements methods defined by FHWA for at least three state or local transportation organizations or for metropolitan planning organizations. Applicants must have at least three years’ experience integrating “geospatial and linear referencing system tools and/or software in a transportation product setting”; architecting data warehouse or data management tools/software; and in cloud architecture or cloud engineering tools/software.
