COI Spotlight—Safety Management Systems
From the very beginning of its history, safety has been the primary mission of U.S. DOT. This is true for the Volpe Center as well, as can be seen in this month's spotlight on our Center of Innovation (COI) for Safety Management Systems. Led by Dr. Marc Mandler, the COI's goal is to help the Volpe Center be recognized as experts in improving transportation safety by helping customers to apply state-of-the-art safety management system principles to their activities.
The COI deploys a variety of tools and capabilities to achieve this goal. COI staff continually update their own skills and expertise through training, technical exchanges and meetings. They re-engineer customer safety management business processes. They develop, manage and host IT systems for safety data. Above all, a major thread that runs through the Center's activities is enabling the acquisition, maintenance, analysis and distribution of transportation safety data to support effective measures to reduce the number, severity and cost of transportation accidents to both customers and society as a whole.
The current major customers for the Center for Safety Management Systems are the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). Among the Center's portfolio of projects are:
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration truck inspection. (
Volpe Center photo by Julie Nixon)
To support the FAA, the Volpe Center developed and manages the Safety Performance Analysis System (SPAS), which is used by aviation safety inspectors and safety program managers as a valuable information source.
Since its establishment in 2000, the FMCSA has turned to the Volpe Center for assistance in organizing their major programs.
The Safety Management Systems COI is now the home for many of these major support activities, including missioncritical information technology capabilities and applications that enable FMCSA to monitor compliance with motor carrier safety laws and procedures. The COI is also supporting FMCSA's major Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 (CSA 2010) initiative.
The Volpe Center has also developed several key data systems for NHTSA, such as ARTEMIS and CIREN. ARTEMIS arose partly as a response to the issue of defective tires on sport utility vehicles and enables NHTSA to discern potential safety threats related to the performance of individual vehicle components. The Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN) Electronic Data System is a vital tool for NHTSA in the collection and analysis of data on transportation crashes.
The Center developed and implemented the Safety Monitoring and Reporting Tool, or SMART, for PHMSA. SMART is a web-based information system that includes data on pipeline accidents, technical specifications and other key information useful to pipeline inspections, monitoring and safety improvements.
