RSG was part of a team selected by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials to help with the design, implementation, and management of VisionEval—a new framework for disaggregate strategic planning models. VisionEval is the result of cooperation between RSG, the Oregon Department of Transportation, and the Federal Highway Administration to reduce greenhouse gases in Oregon (GreenSTEP). This work resulted in three separate strategic planning tools—the Rapid Policy Assessment Tool (RPAT), the Energy and Emissions Reduction Policy Analysis Tool (EERPAT), and the Regional Strategic Planning Model (RSPM)—built from an initial strategic planning model.

VisionEval unites the implementation of the GreenSTEP family of strategic models and specifies a contract for implementing strategic planning modules. It also includes a shared approach to documentation, testing, and software management. We managed the collaborative software development effort in GitHub via branches, issues, milestones, a wiki, and monthly meetings. We finalized the VisionEval framework and integration plan for merging RPAT and RSPM via a set of common and open source R modules/packages. We also reimplemented RPAT under VisionEval, developed an RShiny-based web application for running VisionEval models, and integrated and updated the scenario viewer (visualizer) to work with VisionEval models. Finally, we set up continuous integration testing of software resources using TravisCI and developed and maintained the VisionEval user and developer documentation with markdown and wiki technologies. This was done to enable community management of the software.

VisionEval brings together an entire suite of strategic planning tools for transportation planners and simplifies the development and maintenance of these tools.