Victoria is undergoing a massive transport infrastructure boom, with the government investing $90bn in 180 major road and rail projects across the state.
The ‘Big Build’ – led by the Victorian Infrastructure Delivery Authority (VIDA) and Department of Transport and Planning (DTP) – is an initiative to upgrade infrastructure and expand the transport network to accommodate rapid growth in the state. Key projects include removing 110 level crossings, constructing the North East Link (Victoria’s largest road tunnel) and upgrading the Metro Tunnel, the state’s biggest public transport initiative.
These projects generate vast amounts of fragmented digital information about complex infrastructure and physical assets – including PDFs, 2D drawings, intelligent 3D models, and rich spatial and asset data – across the design, construction, delivery and management phases.
Traditionally, project data was fragmented across thousands of documents in various formats. Disconnected tools and systems made storage, sharing and transfer difficult for project teams, asset managers, transport operators and the DTP.
This added complexity to asset management, particularly in terms of how the assets interact with the existing network and with new projects being developed. Accessing accurate information was not only clunky and time-consuming, but also introduced risk around data standardisation, validation and security.
With the DTP transitioning towards model-based delivery for all projects, it needed to easily access and store accurate data across Big Build projects, from design and delivery to ongoing maintenance. But fragmented data and disconnected digital systems posed a significant challenge for Victoria’s Big Build, making it difficult for stakeholders to access, share and manage critical transport infrastructure information.
This led to the development of the Victorian Transport Digital Engineering (VTDE) transformation programme, an industry leading, connected ecosystem of digital engineering and asset information designed to revolutionise transport asset management in Victoria.
VTDE is an Australian-first, multi-year digital transformation programme that reaches across the entire Victorian transport supply chain. It’s designed to help transport project stakeholders collaborate and communicate more effectively while overcoming legacy handover processes and incompatible systems and frameworks.
VIDA and DTP acquired several data platforms, such as GIS and image capture software, to securely manage project information. These tools provide complete ownership, control and streamlined access to data, but the challenge lay in getting these platforms to communicate with each other and with the various systems used by project partners. That’s where Mott MacDonald came in.
VIDA and DTP engaged Mott MacDonald’s digital engineering team to:
“Having consistent and repeatable digital engineering processes across all projects and assets makes it easier to monitor project progress. It also helps to identify design and quality issues early, allowing them to be addressed before they become too difficult and costly to resolve down the track,” says Kimberley Wilkinson, technical director of project management at Mott MacDonald, who oversaw project collaboration and stakeholder engagement for the VTDE digital transformation project.
Mott MacDonald was also heavily involved in creating a new asset information requirement (AIR) document for the roads, light rail, heavy rail and bus portfolios. The VTDE Digital Engineering Process Guide was pivotal in standardising project workflows, ensuring that all stakeholders followed a unified approach to managing digital assets.
The guide offers a systematic approach for all Big Build project officers to follow when handling model-based deliverables throughout a project’s lifecycle. It sets out clear methods for data creation and sharing, including how delivery partners should transfer information into a common data environment, how the DTP undertakes quality assurance on data received from partners, how it federates and distributes data to make it available to the relevant people, and how it uses and transfers data into its data hub for storage and access.
The guide includes:
Mott MacDonald also helped provide inputs to create the Model Validator Tool, which runs a series of automated, model-based assessments and validation checks of 3D model files to assess the quality and compliance of model-based information, verify the completeness of model object data and ensure compliance with the digital engineering data specifications.
The VTDE Digital Engineering Process Guide, as well as supporting documents, digital tools, and training, was published on the Big Build website.
“With a structured method for transferring files and a new framework for asset allocation, DTP can ensure that all digital engineering data that’s captured and generated during a project lifecycle is compatible, no matter which organisation has gathered the information,” says Kimberley.
Benefits of this approach include:
“Before, if an asset manager was quoting on how many lightbulbs needed to be replaced across an asset, for example, they would have to physically count the number of light poles that appear in numerous PDF documents and drawings. Now, they can log into the system, apply filters, and have an accurate answer in seconds, which saves so much time and money,” says Kimberley.
The VTDE digital transformation initiative has radically changed the way the Victorian government manages its transport data and is already seeing impressive benefits in terms of the speed, effectiveness and accuracy of planning and budgeting for new projects and forward maintenance on assets.
What’s more, communities in Victoria benefit from safer, well-maintained transport infrastructure that will be delivered faster, cheaper and with fewer disruptions, delivering on the department’s promise to keep Victorians moving in the decades to come.
The VTDE digital transformation project was a huge undertaking in change management and stakeholder engagement.
Led by Kimberley, the Mott MacDonald digital engineering team engaged with over 200 personnel working across 15 different organisations, government departments and rail transport operators to understand and document their needs, communicate the benefits of digital engineering and explain the decisions being made.
Kimberley has this advice to companies and government departments considering a similar digital transformation journey: “Take the time to engage with and listen to your stakeholders early and often. Don’t assume to know what people want – ask them. Talk about their challenges, understand what they need to do their jobs and where the bottlenecks are. Run workshops, take different perspectives into account and write a scope of work. And when a decision has been made, explain why. It allows you to manage expectations and disappointments much better.”
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