Chaparral's President, Dr. Joseph E. Wilkinson, founded the company in 1987. Prior to founding Chaparral, Dr. Wilkinson spent 25 years programming and performing statistical analyses on a vast array of computers, working in both the public and private sectors. His experience includes programming, training, data analysis, reporting, and computer hardware design and construction. He received his doctorate in experimental psychology from Baylor University.

In 1988, Chaparral won a contract to develop the State of New Mexico's traffic monitoring system. That market has since expanded so that the company now specializes in traffic software products and research services. One of Chaparral's primary products is TRADAS (Traffic Data System), a system for collecting, editing, summarizing, and reporting a wide range of traffic data. A second version of this product (TRADAS 2) was released in the spring of 1998. In TRADAS 2, the underlying software platform is changed from SAS to C++, an object-oriented programming language. TRADAS 2 also added Oracle™ as the repository of traffic data and statistics.

Dr. Wilkinson is also involved in developing traffic data collection standards. He was a member of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) task force, which produced the AASHTO Guidelines for Traffic Data Programs in 1992. In addition, he is a member of the team headed by Cambridge Systematics that is revising the Guidelines. He has served as a member of ASTM since 1992, and is currently preparing the ASTM standard for archiving traffic data from intelligent transportation systems.

He was a member of the team for NCHRP 1-39, which established the traffic data requirements for the Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide software. He personally wrote the original user interface for the resulting TrafLoad software.

His earlier experience in experimental design, instrumentation, and statistical analysis has enabled Dr. Wilkinson to function in a variety of traffic-related research activities. He was a consultant to the Strategic Highway Research Program's (SHRP's) Expert Task Group for Traffic Monitoring and has carried out several traffic research analyses in conjunction with Cindy Cornell Martinez.