IHSDM is a road safety evaluation software program that offers highway planners and designers the means to evaluate the potential safety impact of specific geometric designs for roads and highways.

CAiCE Software Corporation announced the completion of integration with FHWA’s Interactive Highway Safety Design Model (IHSDM) and their Visual PE civil engineering software. Using LandXML along with CAiCE’s Visual ToolBox technology, CAiCE has integrated IHSDM with its Visual PE software, providing users a fast and efficient way to complete design safety checks utilizing FHWA’s IHSDM software. IHSDM is an innovative road safety evaluation software program that offers highway planners and designers the means to quickly and easily evaluate the potential safety impact of specific geometric designs for roads and highways. IHSDM is composed of several modules focused on various aspects of roadway safety, including: crash prediction, design consistency, driver/vehicle, intersection diagnostic review, policy review, and traffic analysis.

The objective of this integration is to insure that IHSDM is readily available to roadway planners and designers through CAiCE’s civil engineering software suite. The California Department of Transportation and Washington Department of Transportation, both who are CAiCE clients, are part of IHSDM’s Technical Working Group (TWG), which provides continuous evaluations to help insure that IHSDM meets the needs of its targeted end-users. “Organizations using CAiCE Software will now be able to utilize IHSDM more easily and help the entire industry build safer roads”, says Alan Akman, CEO of CAiCE. “We expect many of our State DOT and municipal clients to make this a standard part of their engineering design process”.

CAiCE has created an easy to use interface to IHSDM using its Visual ToolBoxTM technology. Visual ToolBoxes provide extensions to the software that focus on a particular application area. The IHSDM ToolBox provides an interface that lets the roadway designer export roadway models defined in Visual Roads to IHSDM using the LandXML format. Superelevation tables, horizontal and vertical alignments, as well as cross-sections will be extracted from Visual Roads and then evaluated by IHSDM. CAiCE’s IHSDM ToolBox also offers options to edit the exported file using the Microsoft XML Notepad, access FHWA and IHSDM web pages, download the latest version of the IHSDM software and documentation, run the complete IHSDM software, and display or print all IHSDM user guides and documentation. The ToolBox also passes project and setup information between Visual PE and IHSDM so that the user does not have to enter the same information in both systems.