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Delphi DocumentationSupport |
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 DELPHI CASE STUDY
U.S. FEDERAL HIGHWAY ADMINISTRATION,
 Tool — Delphi Client/ServerIndustry — GovernmentApplication — ASPEN Vehicle Inspection SoftwareDatabase Server — InterBaseOVERVIEW • Safety on U.S. highways is being enhanced by use of Delphi-developed commercial vehicle inspection software called ASPEN. • Run on laptops and pen computers, ASPEN allows officials to check carrier and driver's past safety record, enter inspection data, print a report for the driver, and upload the data into state and national information systems. • The ASPEN system is currently used by over 40 states. RETURN ON INVESTMENT • ASPEN is transforming the process of conducting vehicle safety inspections from a manual paper forms process with manual data entry to an electronic process with readable printed reports for drivers. • Staff involved in clerical data entry have been reassigned to more productive tasks. • Data entry into the national information system has been reduced from a 40 day average to less than one week. • Delphi's rapid application development (RAD) capability, compiled performance, and database connectivity combined to deliver a powerful executable (.EXE) application which is distributed to and used by over 40 states. COMPANY BACKGROUND The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is a division of the U.S. Department of Transportation. FHWA's Office of Motor Carriers and state partners are responsible for ensuring commercial truck and bus safety by reducing their involvement in highway accidents and hazardous materials incidents. This is accomplished by education, roadside safety inspections, company safety audits, and enforcement. Information technology is extensively used to focus efforts on carriers with a history of accidents and ongoing safety problems. SITUATION Motor carriers operate the commercial trucks and buses that ply the nation's highways. They are subject to myriad regulations to ensure safe operation. Safety regulations that involve moving vehicles are enforced by state and local police agencies. Safety regulations that involve the state of vehicle roadworthiness are enforced by agencies that conduct roadside inspections. Many of these roadside inspections are conducted at points of entry on the country's borders. For a long time, the inspection process was entirely paper based. Data was keypunched from forms filled in by inspecting officers. The quality of data was uneven and incomplete, because inspectors often wrote cryptic descriptions of findings, and keypunch operators could misread handwriting that was scribbled or garbled. To accommodate the increasing volume of roadside inspections, a data collection system using pen-based computers was adopted. The first system was built with an object-oriented DOS-based program called PenPal. In fact, this Department of Transportation application was the largest PenPal application ever built. As additional features and capabilities for the data collection system became necessary, it was clear that the PenPal application could no longer manage the load. The Office of Motor Carriers undertook development of a new pen-based Windows application that would answer their needs. Developers wanted a visual tool that was very flexible, because of the application's level of sophistication, and they chose Delphi for the job. Five developers produced ASPEN, the new roadside inspection tool, in one year. (During the same time, the same developers also used Delphi to produce AVALANCHE, an application that collects information uploaded from ASPEN, and puts in into an InterBase database for analysis and reporting. SOLUTION ASPEN is a front-end system for pen computers used by agents to collect roadside safety inspection data. Besides general roadworthiness concerns such as tire inflation, tread depth, and brake wear, safety inspectors look at cargo tanks and hazardous materials containment, labeling, and packaging. Inspection data is quickly input using a stylus and pick lists. The system is dynamic; all information is instantly edit-checked. For example, the driver's age is automatically calculated from license information, and a driver who is found to be under 21 will be cited. Or, if a vehicle has a serious enough problem, the software prints out an order that takes the vehicle out of service until repairs or other safety corrections are made. Roadside agents conduct approximately two million inspections per year nationwide. The ASPEN system will now account for the bulk of that load. ASPEN removes the keypunching bottleneck, with its potential for data-entry errors. The elimination of the keypunching step saved considerable costs and freed staff for reassignment to more productive work. But reducing costs is not ASPEN's only benefit. More important is the increased throughput of inspection results. The Federal Highway Administration is targeting carriers who threaten highway safety by conducting systemwide safety audits of companies with poor records. Before the ASPEN system was deployed, it took 40 days for a roadside violation report to percolate up to the national information system. With ASPEN, inspection data is uploaded daily into a state-level database, which is then transmitted into the national system in Washington. Timeliness and data quality are both significantly improved, because electronic data entry and transmission maintains data integrity throughout the whole system. The goal is to reduce the time lapse to just a few hours, so that safety audits can be conducted on a timelier basis and highway safety improved overall. Delphi's short learning curve got developers up to speed very quickly, allowing them to produce ASPEN in less time than other tools would have taken. Third-party components, such as the Async Communications Library, could easily be incorporated, and they were able to preserve the investment in several of their own DLL components written in C++. TECHNOLOGY
DEVELOPMENT
CUSTOMER COMMENTS "ASPEN has been up and running long enough to know that it's doing what everyone wants it to do. Lots of people whose main job is to inspect trucks depend on it to get their jobs done. Everyone's happy, and Delphi is a big part of the reason they are."
—Michael Blevins, Field Systems Group Manager,
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| Made in Borland® Copyright© 1994-2003 Borland Software Corporation. All rights reserved. Report Piracy, Legal Notices, Privacy Policy Last Modified Wednesday, 05-Jun-2002 17:31:46 EST |
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