By Angus Draheim, Austroads Data Harmonisation Project Manager
Competing funding priorities mean road managers need to provide a safe and reliable road network with increasingly cost efficiency. However, the information base to inform asset management strategies is often less comprehensive and comparable than required for effective local and network-wide strategies.
Compounding this problem is the fact that there is no national data standard and multiple data standards are used, often within the one organisation.
The differences in road asset data limit the comparability of asset information between road networks, and increase the costs of working across different road networks. The absence of a national standard causes high transactional driven by incomplete, different and numerous data sets, and the need to convert them into useable formats. Significantly, governments cannot attribute or differentiate costs to users because the cost of service delivery cannot be consistently and accurately determined. Further, innovation, investment and greater economic efficiency across the transport system is limited.
Austroads Road Data Harmonisation Project
In 2015 Austroads identified the development and implementation of a harmonised Data Standard for road maintenance and investment for Australia and New Zealand as a strategic priority.
The initial Data Standard was published in November 2016. A second version designed for national implementation will be produced by early 2017. A consultation draft was released on 6 December to gain feedback on some improvements that have been made to the Standard. Those wishing to comment can read the consultation draft here.
The Standard has been developed to provide a common understanding and language for the management and investment in road and associated infrastructure. It is intended to be utilised by all road asset owners, managers, road network funding agencies.
Some of the more significant benefits of a national data standard arise from how common standard and structure is deployed and used within road agencies and councils.
Many emerging technologies can be significantly enabled through the application of a data standard. For example, the common data environment delivered by the Standard will be a key step in the adoption of digital engineering technology in the road sector in Australia and New Zealand.
Now, like any Standard achieving widespread application requires careful planning.
Austroads is developing an implementation strategy for the Data Standard which is likely to require a nationally agreed and staged adoption plan, national collaboration on supporting Information Architecture and the linking of key funding programs to the Data Standard.
It has been proposed to structure implementation such that an initial component of critical national exchangeable items is harmonised first, over (potentially) a two to three-year period. This would be followed by a more complete adoption in subsequent stages. This approach mitigates the impacts of transitioning to the standard for road managers.
Consultation on the data standard and its implementation will continue across the first half of 2017.