Process development and integration for the six-year program and the statewide transportation improvement program

The statewide transportation improvement program (STIP), a three-year programming document required by federal regulations, has been prepared by the Virginia highway agency as an abridgement of its six-year program (SYTP),which is required by state regulations. Generation of the STIP from the SYTP has been determined to not meet federal requirements. The innovation of this effort is the application of business process modeling to improve hierarchical integration of federal and state transportation programming using the IDEF format. Describing the statewide and federal program processes using the IDEF standards has several benefits. The high-level outputs of software models are charts with underlying characteristics of activities (inputs, controls, mechanisms, and outputs). IDEF models support the business analyst to describe the statewide and federal programs and other processes consistently. Use of the IDEF standards for process improvement may evolve to be a common practice across the agency