Case Study: Stormwater Management System
Dec 31, 2009
By using a new .NET-based Storm Water Management System, the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) is significantly increasing productivity, reducing development time, and providing seamless interoperability with existing technology. Using the Microsoft® .NET Framework and Visual Studio.NET, Simplify delivered a web-based application solution that allows ALDOT to reduce the time and cost associated with keeping the waterways of Alabama pollution-free.
Problem
The mission of the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) is to provide a safe, efficient, and environmentally sound transportation infrastructure for all the citizens of Alabama. ALDOT employs approximately 4300 workers in nine regions to facilitate the economic and social development in the State of Alabama.
One of the major objectives for ALDOT was to develop a solution to manage the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) as passed by the U.S. Congress under the Clean Water Act of 1987. This multiple phase act requires ALDOT to coordinate and monitor industrial activities that will discharge storm water runoff into the water bodies of the United States.
To meet their goal and insure compliance with state and federal laws, ALDOT needed a way to develop and secure, a scalable solution that could be exposed to internal employees, outside contractors, and coordinate workflow activities with the Department of Environment Management.
Solution
To meet these challenges, ALDOT decided to automate the existing paper-based system with a web-based tracking system that would incorporate site inspections and monitoring data collection. ALDOT also wanted an application architecture that was extendable, scalable, and provided transparent interoperability with existing legacy technology. To help meet these goals, Our developers used the Microsoft® .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET to build a service-oriented architecture that is accessible via a variety of client interface applications.
According to Simplify's Chief Software Architect and the project's lead developer Bruce Thomas, the decision to use the .NET Framework was based on a design that met and exceeded the scalability, extensibility, and interoperability requirements while offering the development productivity to deliver the solution in a faster time-to-production.
"With .NET and its seamless support for web services and open data protocols, we are able to expose the applications core architecture to a number of different interfaces and platforms, which means we can accommodate a wide range of users and integration points, all communicating to the same application layers," says Thomas.
Benefits
In addition to lowering the development time, the level of flexibility provided by the .NET platform and development environment has been a key success factor in ALDOT's ability to leverage its existing technology investments.
To further minimize training cost, we designed and developed an incredibly rich web-based interface that seamlessly and engaging end-user experience. The entire system can be complimented by an application running on mobile devices, which provides an end-to-end solution and another dramatic increase in productivity.