Infrastructure maintenance is critical for public service provision, demanding efficient resource management. The Department of Transport Main Roads (TMR) oversees around 33,412 km of state-controlled roads, allocating around $500m annually for pavement and surfacing treatments. However, TMR faces the challenge of effectively allocating funds amidst infrastructure deterioration, with investment needs surpassing available funding.
The current pavement management system, SCENARIO, is limited in optimising investment decisions due to processing constraints, taking considerable time to run analyses. To address this, TMR initiated the ADVICE project that seeks to optimise pavement rehabilitation and maintenance by modelling whole-of-life economic costs, enhancing data analytics, enabling finer analysis (100 meters instead of 1 km), and facilitating multiple what-if scenarios efficiently.
TMR and SAP collaborated to develop the ADVICE solution, utilising SAP cloud computing, data warehousing, and advanced analytics. Integrated, it facilitates customised, data-driven decision support tools, adeptly manages large datasets, and utilises machine learning capabilities.
By mid-2024, the ADVICE System will be operational, and capable of analysing 334,120 individual 100m road segments state-wide enabling TMR to better understand budgets and performance at a holistic level. By leveraging ADVICE, TMR could model the whole-life economic cost of multi-year treatment decisions, moving beyond simple prioritisation to towards optimisation by finding the best treatment plan that exists within a set of constraints. This enhanced capacity and speed will enable swift and comprehensive analyses, allowing TMR to explore various asset management strategies effectively.
With its unmatched capacity, speed, and optimisation features, ADVICE will empower TMR to make better-informed decisions, improving service levels, reducing lifecycle costs, and enhancing fiscal management across the state’s road network.