Innovation

Executive Summary

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) initiated the AASHTO Data Integration Project in 2018 to identify interfaces that AASHTOWare (AW) products should have with each other and with other enterprise systems at State Departments of Transportation (DOTs). The enterprise systems included: Design, Financial, Asset Management, Document Management, Geographical Information (GIS) and Linear Referencing Systems (LRS). The identified interfaces, if built, would ensure that best practices in data governance and management can be used for supporting AW business users and processes; and, deployment of AW products at State DOTs can be simplified. WSP worked with AASHTO Data Oversight Committee, Technical and Applications Architecture (T&AA) Committee and State DOTs who use AW products to identify the AW interfaces that should be developed.

The next step is to create the foundation for development of these interfaces. To establish the identified interfaces, RESTful Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) need to be developed for each AW Product dispositioned to the well-accepted OpenAPI standard. Once developed, these APIs can be used to provide functionality from AW products use in any DOT enterprise system (including AW products). The design, development, testing and implementation of such AW APIs would involve multiple stakeholders, including AASHTO Data Oversight Committee, T&AA, AW Product Task Forces, AW Product Contractors and State DOTs.

For planning, design, development and deployment of AW APIs, WSP is pleased to present this proposal for Phase 2 of the AASHTO Data Integration Project. As part of this phase, WSP will create specifications for APIs associated with each AW Product using the Swagger Open API Specification tool, and, provide the specifications to the AW Product vendors for development of the APIs. The work will be performed under two sub-phases—Phases 2A and 2B—and will be performed over two AASHTO fiscal years FY 2020-2021 and FY 2021-2022, respectively. Phase 2A will include tasks that WSP can complete with minimal involvement from product contractors. The thrust of this sub-phase of work will be to initiate communications with AASHTOWare contractors regarding the goals of the project, creating an initial or proof-of-concept API design for sample high-value interfaces developed in Phase 1, exposing and educating the contractors on the Swagger API development environment as it applies to the OpenAPI Standard, developing training materials, and establishing the API production supporting environment. During this sub-phase, WSP will be fully prepared to support those contractors that may be able to make greater use of the Swagger environment, generated scaffolding artifacts, and push forward with the development of the detailed API implementations. However, it is anticipated that Phase 2B is when most AASHTOWare Contractors will be available to work on concrete implementations resulting from the Swagger production environment. WSP will be prepared to provide technical support and additional services to AASHTOWare contractors in this work phase. The following paragraphs provide a high-level overview of the work tasks by sub-phase. Some aspects of the delivery will not be unique or isolated to a sub phase, however, each sub phase will have a full accounting of activity as it applies to the workplan execution.