Caliper Corporation was founded in 1983 as a developer of mapping software and is headquartered in Newton, Massachusetts

Newton, Massachusetts

Newton is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States bordered to the east by Boston. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the population of Newton was 85,146, making it the eleventh largest city in the state.-Villages:...

.

Caliper develops geographic information systems (GIS) and transportation software. Caliper is also a consulting and R&D provider offering professional services in quantitative management consulting, transportation, and decision support systems development.

Caliper is the developer of the TransCAD transportation planning software, TransModeler

TransModeler

TransModeler is the name of a traffic simulation product for doing wide-area traffic planning, traffic management, and emergency evacuation studies...

 traffic simulation software, and Maptitude

Maptitude

Maptitude is a mapping software program created by Caliper Corporation that allows users to view, edit and integrate maps. The software and technology are designed to facilitate the geographical visualization and analysis of either included data or custom external data.Maptitude is intended for...

 GIS packages.

TransCAD

TransCAD is software for transportation planning. In addition to the standard point, line, area, and image layers in a GIS map, TransCAD supports route system layers and has tools for creating, manipulating and displaying routes. TransCAD uses a network data structure to support routing

Route assignment

Route assignment, route choice, or traffic assignment concerns the selection of routes between origins and destinations in transportation networks. It is the fourth step in the conventional transportation forecasting model, following trip generation, trip distribution, and mode choice...

 and network optimization

Operations research

Operations research is an interdisciplinary mathematical science that focuses on the effective use of technology by organizations...

 models. TransCAD includes trip generation, distribution, mode choice, and traffic assignment models that support transportation planning

Transportation planning

Transportation planning is a field involved with the evaluation, assessment, design and siting of transportation facilities .-Models and Sustainability :...

 and travel demand forecasting

Transportation forecasting

Transportation forecasting is the process of estimating the number of vehicles or people that will use a specific transportation facility in the future. For instance, a forecast may estimate the number of vehicles on a planned road or bridge, the ridership on a railway line, the number of...

. TransCAD has a set of dynamic segmentation and linear referencing

Linear Reference System

Linear referencing , is a reference system in which the locations of features are identified by a relative measure along a linear element, for example a milestone along a road. Each feature is located by either a point or a line...

 tools for managing highway

Highway

A highway is any public road. In American English, the term is common and almost always designates major roads. In British English, the term designates any road open to the public. Any interconnected set of highways can be variously referred to as a "highway system", a "highway network", or a...

, rail

Rail transport

Rail transport is a means of conveyance of passengers and goods by way of wheeled vehicles running on rail tracks. In contrast to road transport, where vehicles merely run on a prepared surface, rail vehicles are also directionally guided by the tracks they run on...

, pipeline

Pipeline transport

Pipeline transport is the transportation of goods through a pipe. Most commonly, liquids and gases are sent, but pneumatic tubes that transport solid capsules using compressed air are also used....

, and other networks

Transport network

A transport network, or transportation network in American English, is typically a network of roads, streets, pipes, aqueducts, power lines, or nearly any structure which permits either vehicular movement or flow of some commodity....

.

Product history

TransCAD was first released as a MS-DOS

MS-DOS

MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...

-based transportation GIS package in 1985. TransCAD 3.0, the first Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 version, was released on May 28, 1996. TransCAD 4.8 was replaced by TransCAD 5.0, the current version, on January 2, 2008.

Web-based version

TransCAD for the Web is a web-based version of TransCAD that uses application source code that can be edited using Javascript, HTML, and ASP.NET. Application templates (Mapplications) are used to create a web application or service. The default templates include Ajax

Ajax (programming)

Ajax is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications...

 applications and mashups that use Google Maps

Google Maps

Google Maps is a web mapping service application and technology provided by Google, free , that powers many map-based services, including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google Transit, and maps embedded on third-party websites via the Google Maps API...

via the Google Map API. TransCAD for the Web was the first web-based GIS for Transportation (GIS-T), and remains the only transportation GIS with web development capabilities.

External links

• Caliper's Corporate home page* SRPEDD Signalized Intersections - Example application
• NEW YORK METROPOLITAN TRANSPORTATION COUNCIL - Example application
• Detroit DOT Transit Information System - Example application