The Florida Public Service Commission's motor carrier information system

The Florida Public Service Commission (FPSC), in conjunction with the Florida State University Computing Center, has recently computerized the handling of information on motor carriers that are regulated through the Commission's Transportation Department. The authors feel that this system, the Motor Carrier Information System (MCIS), has successfully combined the advantages of several available data processing concepts to produce a very useful regulatory tool.Although the next section does provide a brief overall description of the MClS, this paper deals specifically with only one phase of the system, the handling of ICC Regulated Carriers. It should become clear that the techniques used within the MCIS readily lend themselves to any data processing application where data can be separated into two categories: (1) Identification information (fairly fixed in length) and (2) free format text (unlimited in length, with possible subdivisions).