USDOT Funding Opportunity Announcement
The USDOT is seeking funding requests for ADCMS with submissions due July 31st.
We are forming a collaboration to prepare a submission in support of participating DOT’s to expand the XBRL and Financial Data Exchange (FDX) taxonomies for the monthly application for progress payment and surety bond data sets for the benefit of DOT’s and all the stakeholders they engage with.
The funding would be targeted to just those two data sets and expand on DOT progress payment transparency already provided by TxDOT, Caltrans and VDOT.
The collaboration would provide participating DOT’s support and engagement so they can secure funding to update their respective systems to receive and administer digital surety bonds and implement a standardized progress payment platform utilizing XBRL to provide monitoring data digitally to all stakeholders
Background
The DOE Orange Button initiative contributed towards an International Digital Ecosystem Architecture (IDEA) based on open data standards and a hierarchy of data standards. Identifying XBRL as the top tier data standard in an International Digital Ecosystem Architecture (IDEA) to enable data interoperability between multiple new and legacy data standards and data sets.
Achieving data interoperability between legacy resources and across federal agencies will promote next generation infrastructure and cost savings enabled by innovations made possible by the IDEA.
The IIJA and IRA legislation included the Accelerating Advanced Digital Construction Management Systems Program (ADCMS), which directly applies to systems that are used for planning, permitting, financing, insuring and building next generation infrastructure by leveraging digital ecosystems, the Metaverse.
Synergizing the DOT and DOE data standards for infrastructure construction will have a major impact on all stakeholder’s ability to create and innovate next generation products and services that cross all industry segments, public and private, for sustainable and resilient communities.
Case Study
There are 43,096 agencies (Authority Having Jurisdiction - AHJ) that issue permits for solar projects, each with their own legacy system for administering the permit process. Each with similar data requirements, but each slightly different enough so stakeholders had to work with multiple data requirements that had to be individually administered for each AHJ.
The 2016 DOE Orange Button initiative accelerated data interoperability by expanding the XBRL taxonomy for data elements related to permitting, financing, insurance and building of solar projects. Resulting in OB JSON and enabling the SolarApp to provide a single standardized data set for all 43 thousand agencies.
A standardized data set that can also be utilized by all the stakeholders on the project, including finance, insurance and surety for a digital ecosystem, the Metaverse.
The 50 DOT’s and the thousands of public agencies that administer infrastructure contracts each have a legacy process and data set for the “monthly application for payment” in their respective systems that could transition to standardized data sets to achieve even greater efficiency gains throughout the stakeholder ecosystem. Just as the SolarApp is doing today.
Current and Future State
The current state of TxDOT, Caltrans and VDOT systems provide project payment information as a limited value PDF or on-screen image without a data standard identified, rendering the data largely inaccessible and ineffective.
Future state is the same DOT systems are simply modified to provide exportable data in a standardized XBRL or FDX format that could be accessed and imported by stakeholders as part of a Metaverse for a wide range of innovative digital construction management products and services.
These two data sets will enable all the DOT’s to easily provide critical project data to all stakeholders and enable every construction management system to transition to digital with key data for innovation with respect to project analytics and risk management.
DOTs providing timely project data to the capital markets, finance, insurance and surety, will improve access and pricing to enable more local and small businesses to participate in DOT projects.
DOTs providing timely project data to surety companies will improve risk management for both the DOT and the surety, providing better protection for all stakeholders.
Demonstration Projects
SRC is working with current clients to implement Surety Based Risk Management (SBRM) as a model for how easy a digital ecosystem is to employ.
Multiple surety companies and project owners are registered on the BuilderChain platform, which allows contractors to register so they can engage in the digital ecosystem by submitting their surety bonds and monthly progress payments digitally. Data that can be shared, subject to permissions, with other stakeholders and enables project monitoring for the surety to improve underwriting and risk management.
Collaboration
The collaboration will include academic institutions, construction software platforms, insurance and surety companies, trade associations and multiple standards bodies.
