Castle Rock Consultants has undertaken the design, development, deployment, operation, and maintenance of a Condition Reporting System (CRS) throughout Florida, working in partnership with stakeholders in the Florida Department of Transportation and the iFlorida group to build a system that will provide traveler information, improve real-time data sharing between agencies, and enhance traffic operations and safety. Our approach is based on:

the use of existing developments and products to minimize developmental load; customization of these existing products to meet the needs of users across the state; implementation of a modular, distributed, redundant and expandable architecture; and the application of national standard C2C interfaces between each system module.

Castle Rock applies national and international standards to the task of building modular subsystems and components, providing plug-and-play interoperability between separately-developed systems. This interoperability will translate into the success of the iFlorida deployment, allowing for expansion and providing for interaction with other software initiatives.

Florida’s Condition Reporting System is based on Castle Rock’s CARS (Condition Acquisition and Reporting System), and will be composed of various different modules. These development modules will each create independent pieces of software that will plug and play using national ITS standards as center-to-center (C2C) interfaces between each module. These modules include Dynamic Message Sign (DMS) and Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) software, 511 system and 511 website.

The Condition Reporting System uses the World Wide Web to allow authorized staff to input construction, accident, delay, and other roadway, weather and transit (bus, rail, airport, ferry) event information into a statewide event database. Since extreme weather is also such a major player in Florida, the Condition Reporting System will have a large role in disseminating weather information as well as traffic and travel conditions.

The initial CRS servers can also support routine DOT dispatch, press release and emergency response activities. These functions often help promote early acceptance of CRS deployments by giving users various tools that can serve some existing agency needs.

For more information on iFlorida, please contact: