Clarus: Concept of Operations

The Clarus Initiative establishes a vision for the leveraging of local and regional road/route weather observations to serve a greater community and enhance 21st century transportation operations. Its goal is to provide broader weather information support for surface transportation system operators in their efforts to improve safety, reliability and security of transportation users. The Clarus Initiative consists of two development components. The first component is the development of the Clarus System – a network for sharing, quality controlling, and exchanging surface environmental data and relevant surface transportation conditions. The second component is the development of tools (such as decision support systems) that make effective use of the Clarus System. This document provides a high-level definition of how the system works. The focus of the Concept of Operations is establishing an understanding of the needs of the various stakeholders representing different weather data use market segments or groups and how the Clarus System can be structured to meet the users’ stated needs. They exhibit different surface transportation weather data needs based on content, timeliness, level and type of value added processing, reliability, and other related criteria. Central to this document are examples of functional scenarios for many of the market segments that will be served by the system. Each scenario is described in a narrative text and should be evaluated along with the overall Clarus Framework Scenario that includes an illustrated Use Case Diagram and a Sequence Diagram to model the typical concepts anticipated to exist in the application of Clarus System data.