Lockheed is driving force behind new DOT traffic system

If Lockheed Martin Corp. and the Transportation Department have their way, one day soon wishing you could be alerted personally to where Beltway traffic is at a standstill and how to avoid it may be a thing of the past.

Under a 15-month contract worth approximately $2.6 million, Lockheed will refine and validate the requirements and architecture of DOT’s planned new communications infrastructure that ultimately will permit safety and traffic systems to communicate, according to a Lockheed statement today.

Called IntelliDrive, the system is a multimodal initiative that aims to enable safe, interoperable networked wireless communications among vehicles, the infrastructure and passengers’ personal communications devices, according to the statement.

Under this contract, Lockheed Martin’s team will investigate how IntelliDrive communication capabilities could support applications both on and off vehicles related to safety, public services and traffic management, and update the overall systems architecture documentation.

DOT’s IntelliDrive system will take advantage of the potentially transformative capabilities of wireless technology to make surface transportation safer, smarter and greener, Lockheed said.

Lockheed Martin is partnered with Iteris Inc., a transportation systems engineering company, to provide process-focused systems engineering skills to capture stakeholders’ needs and formulate the system concepts and architecture, the statement said.

This team also supported the development and deployment of DOT’s National Intelligent Transportation System architecture.

Lockheed Martin, of Bethesda, Md., ranks No. 1 on Washington Technology’s 2010 Top 100 list of the largest federal government prime contractors.