Consensus Systems Technologies (ConSysTec) - Architecture Applications

ConSysTec has developed two application tools to assist with the development and maintenance of regional ITS architectures.

The first application is Visual Architect, which is a Microsoft Visio application to assist with the visualization of the regional ITS architecture and edit Turbo Architecture.

The second application is Web Builder, which uses the ITS architecture information entered into Turbo Architecture, and creates a website depicting the contents and relationship in the ITS architecture.

To read more information on both applications, please click on application on the left.

Visual Architect

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Visual Architect is a Microsoft Visio application developed by Consensus Systems Technologies (ConSysTec) to create and modify ITS Architecture customized market packages based on the U.S. National ITS Architecture.

Customized market package diagrams are at the heart of an ITS Architecture using the methodologies developed by ConSysTec. While Visual Architect does not perform all functions related to creating an ITS Architecture, it does provide a highly interactive and graphical view of the ITS Elements and their associated system interfaces being defined in the ITS architecture. Also, Visual Architect provides an interface to the Turbo Architecture database, which has become the de-facto standard for encoding regional ITS architectures. In this capacity, Visual Architect greatly speeds the time required to communicate operational concepts to stakeholders, encode regional ITS architecture topology information into Turbo Architecture, and enables accurately managing large ITS architectures an economic reality.

Visual Architect complements Turbo Architecture. In some respects, Visual Architect is a graphical front-end for portions of Turbo Architecture. For example, Visual Architect will automatically update market package and regional ITS architecture flow selections in Turbo Architecture based on the content of the customized market package diagrams. But most importantly, Visual Architect depends on Turbo Architecture for creation and maintenance of the ITS element inventory, and user-defined flows. For example, the ITS element names used in the customized market package diagrams are accessed directly from the Turbo Architecture database. Finally, after the user has finished using Visual Architect to update the Turbo Architecture database, there are still steps, unrelated to Visual Architect that the user must perform to have a complete Turbo Architecture deliverable. For example, equipment package and functional requirements selections are not performed by Visual Architect, and must be manually entered in Turbo Architecture as normally required when using Turbo Architecture by itself.

For a presentation on the benefits of such a graphical front-end, please click here. This draft presentation will be presented at the ITS America Conference this May, 2006.

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Web Builder

  Click here for Flash Demo

Web Builder is a Microsoft Access application developed by Consensus Systems Technologies (ConSysTec) to create a hypertext html view of an ITS Architecture. Web Builder creates a website that provides an easy to use, highly accessible view of a regional ITS Architecture. The website created allows users to rapidly and easily find the elements and interfaces of interest to specific parts of a regional ITS Architecture (by function or by stakeholder), provide stakeholder feedback on specific elements of the ITS architecture, and supports printing portions of interest directly from any current Web browser.

Customized market package diagrams are at the heart of an ITS Architecture using the methodologies developed by ConSysTec. Using the customized market package diagrams developed with stakeholders by ConSysTec, and with the ITS architecture information stored in the Turbo Architecture, Web Builder extracts the relevant information and creates the website for stakeholder review, participation, and use. A majority of our client's ITS architectures that are hosted on ConSysTec's website were created using Web Builder.

Web Builder is compatible with current versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Mozilla Firefox. The hypertext links are created in a manner to that most web servers can host the websites.

For a paper and presentation on the benefits of hosting regional ITS architectures on websites, please click here for the paper and here for the presentation. This paper and slides were presented at the ITS World Congress Conference in November, 2005.

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