Challenge

As an agency managing funding for multiple districts, TII was faced with a problem. How do you distribute money over different regions in an objective way? Logically, it makes sense to invest money into roads with a high amount of traffic volume, however, we need to consider regions with lower volume roads as they may be the only connection between two rural locations. Considering prioritization, it makes sense to invest more into roads connecting a big city (Dublin) than a road that connects two villages.

Solution

Deighton and TII developed a process where the entire budget was divided into two parts. The first part was the basic budget for Fixed District distribution. For instance, we take 60% of the total budget and distribute that based on a basic rule, depending on the population, on the traffic load importance, or other criteria established by the team. This was the Fixed Budget for each district or region.

The second part, the Flexible Budget, comprised the remaining 40%. For this, Deighton set up the cross-asset optimization object to determine which district would receive the bulk of the Flexible Budget. The remaining budget was run through the cross-asset analysis function in dTIMS. In the following table you can see the additional funding allocated each year and the additional flexible funding at the bottom.

Results

TII is using the cross-asset solution setup for districts and is very happy with the budget results to date. The flexibility allows TII to manage different options and have a continuous dialogue with the decision-makers.