Primarily funded by the USDOT’s Smart City Challenge, the Smart Columbus Program is a collection of eight transportation, mobility and data projects aimed at improving access to jobs, enhancing tourism, stimulating the economy, connecting residents to safe and reliable transportation, and supporting efficient and sustainable movement of people and goods throughout Columbus. The Smart Columbus Operating System (SCOS) forms the backbone of the other seven Smart Columbus projects. The Operating System consists of three parts: the user facing Operating System website, the technical architecture, and the open source code/community.

By ingesting, visualizing and sharing open data, the SCOS was crafted to host performance metrics, serve the data needs of public agencies, researchers, and entrepreneurs, and serve as the foundation for other program projects. The goals of the SCOS include containing accessible and user-friendly analytics and visualization tools, ensuring an open-source format to allow a scalable, extensible, portable, and sustainable platform for other cities to leverage, supporting regional initiatives and data sharing, interoperability with other regions and transportation systems, and ensuring management compliance with respect to security and data privacy. The SCOS was initiated in 2016 and the SCOS data platform 2.0 was launched on April 23, 2019, heralding the start of the project’s demonstration period, which was completed on March 31, 2021.

The total costs of SCOS were $15,958,157, including the costs by multiple vendors associated in both the deployment and operations phase:

• The total deployment cost was $8,038,495 during the deployment phase (from 2016 to April 22, 2019 when version 2.0 launched):
• The total operations cost was $7,919,662 during the operations phase (from the 2.0 launch to the end of the demonstration period, from April 23, 2019 to March 31, 2021).

Since SCOS aimed to continue to operate post-demonstration, Table 1 summarizes the materials costs (software and services) that occur monthly. This table excludes services provided by cooperative agreement, such as the data curator staff, or software packages that had no cost associated with their use.

Table 1. Monthly Reoccurring and Support Costs. Source: City of Columbus