MAC URISA 2016

The North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority, Inc. (NJTPA) is the federally funded Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for the northern New Jersey region, which is home to 6.7 million people and covers about three quarters of the state. The NJTPA, with the support from JMT Technology Group, is working to develop the Planning Recommendations Integration Management Engine (PRIME) based on a prototype developed by agency staff. PRIME is a web-based relational database system composed of individual geo-referenced records. It contains specific transportation problems (needs) and solutions (recommendations) taken from a wide range of planning studies developed by the NJTPA, its subregions and partner agencies. PRIME will enable transportation planning and engineering professionals to enter these records, search through category, keyword and lasso search methods, set connections between the needs and recommendations records and core policies and investment strategies of the NJTPA, query and view records at varying geographic scales, assess them in context with the NJTPA’s performance based planning process and use analysis tools that will help bundle related recommendations into possible projects that could be advanced for further study or implementation. Initial development focus for PRIME centers on producing: 1) an intuitive interface for mapping study needs and recommendations; 2) tools for packaging complementary needs and recommendations with information from other planning efforts; 3) GIS and database analytical tools to draw spatial and non-spatial connections between needs and recommendations; 3) and tools to export maps and reports to common programs including MS Office, Adobe PDF, and MS Access for further offline use. PRIME will utilize Esri’s JavaScript API to interact with ArcGIS server and will manage security and authentication using ArcGIS Online. PRIME’s functionality will include the capability to create project boundaries from existing GIS layers, to support the import of multiple records, and to support tracking the history of data entry and editing. Reporting and analysis tools will be designed to provide the ability to package data and generate specific reports based on analysis of the system database. The reporting tools will provide the ability to generate summaries of the recommendations that have advanced toward implementation phase pull information from complementary agency datasets and produce real-time summary statistics and graphical charts for all attributes and relationships. The analysis tools will be designed to assist users with packaging related needs and recommendations based on the location and to specifically define attributes regarding the relationships. ArcGIS server will provide all required spatial analytical functions that cannot be handled with built-in SQL Server spatial functionality.