Bridges

Victorian Transport Digital Engineering (VTDE), a shared initiative across the Victorian transport portfolio, is connecting for the future with a transformation program which will activate the power of digital engineering through people, process and technology. Our vision? An industry leading, hyperconnected ecosystem of digital engineering and asset information. But what does this mean?

Currently in year 5 of an 8-year program, the initiative has spent a significant amount of time defining the Department of Transport and Planning (DTP) asset information requirements (AIR), which act as the foundation for our VTDE program. The AIR describes DTP’s geometric, non-geometric and unstructured data requirements throughout an asset’s lifecycle from cradle to grave.

DTP is a complex organisation with many business units, each with their own unique use cases for asset information. As part of the program, it was critical to assess, rationalise and standardise all the user requirements where possible and appropriate for road, rail and bus assets. The major structures asset management experts within DTP have complex user requirements relating to bridges.

Significant engagement was undertaken to construct the building blocks of a bridge data model with the flexibility to suit the many and varied bridge types across Victoria. These location-based building blocks are aligned to the Uniclass classification system to provide industry with a consistent methodology where the design and construction of bridges and exchange of asset data can occur.

These building blocks will also be used to retrofit and build the data models for existing bridges across our state, ready to load into our enterprise-wide asset information management system, IBM Maximo. The data will allow DTP’s structural load assessment team to record information on bridge inspections, defects, rectification works, structural load assessments and access restrictions within our system and improve data quality and accuracy. It will also improve process efficiencies across our work teams with ready access to this data to aid decision making.