The National Transport Research Organisation (NTRO) is upgrading and expanding its state-of-the-art fleet of survey vehicles, with some improvements representing world firsts for the transport sector. We sit down with Russell Gallagher, Chief Technology Officer – NTRO, the architect behind this advancement.
The National Transport Research Organisation (NTRO) has long been held in high stead for its development and contributions to road infrastructure measurement tools.
In this decade alone, the NTRO has led the acceleration of tools capable of measuring both structural and functional pavement conditions, guided by its highly technical and knowledgeable team.
Within this talented group are individuals such as Russell Gallagher, Chief Technology Officer – NTRO, whose focus and endeavours are driven by a simple yet motivating question, ‘how can we do better?’
“A few years ago, I began the development of a strategy called ‘data reform’, and the idea of data reform is to rethink our collection, processing, storage and maintenance of our data,” he says.
Gallagher proceeded by mapping out the NTRO’s entire process, from route creation, through to survey and processing, and all the way to client delivery, to understand how things worked.
Under the previous process, data analytics and infrastructure measurement teams would manually create a “road list”: a set of roads and routes the client wanted surveyed. For each route, the team would determine which roads to include and the direction of travel, as well as the lanes that needed to be captured.
Manual in‑vehicle capture was then conducted, with operators pressing buttons and at times recording details manually. This data was then recorded and physically shipped via hard drives back to the office, where another team manually processed significant data sets over one to three months, checking for errors.
If problems were found late, vehicles would sometimes be sent back across the country to recapture sections, delaying the process further.
“The number one request that we were getting from the market and wider industry was that they needed their data faster,” Gallagher says. “Our clients rely on this data to drive their maintenance planning, budget planning and importantly, their general reactivity to known issues on their road network.
“The faster they get their data, the better. So that quickly became a central focus for us –‘how do we speed up this process?’”
Upgrading kit
After identifying potential inefficiencies and bottlenecks, Gallagher and his team saw significant potential – not only in increasing the quality and speed of delivery, but also in reducing the end cost for clients.
Once executive buy-in was secured, the next steps in the data reform strategy were identified. Among these was the need to establish a re-engineered fleet, tailored to differing client needs.
The only question being, did the existing infrastructure and fleet have the capability to support such an ambition?
“Our internal NTRO team, along with a few key external contractors, have now engineered six vehicles, supporting four different platforms,” Gallagher says.
The biggest of these is the iPAVE, a semi-trailer truck. Equipped with high-end pavement measurement sensors, the iPAVE delivers network-level, high-spec surveys for state road authorities and larger metropolitan areas.
Next up is the Automated Crack Detection (ACD) vehicle, which is equipped with a Pavemetrics LCMS2 (Laser Crack Measurement System) sensor, as well as several LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) lasers, delivering extreme accuracy for road roughness, rutting, cracking, and additional parameters.
Both Australian and Indian-spec variants have been developed, reflecting international demand for the NTRO’s updated fleet.
The newest offering in this updated fleet is the Network Survey Vehicle (NSV) based on a Toyota Prado. Targeting smaller LGAs (local government areas) and cost-sensitive clients, the NSV still delivers high-quality network data, without LGA’s needing to run their own asset management and visualisation systems.
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Across the board
Several key technological features remain consistent across the entire fleet, regardless of each vehicle’s scale or capabilities.
“One of the biggest differences with the updated fleet is that we’re actually processing the data as we capture it,” Gallagher says. “We generate up to three gigabytes of data per lane kilometre, huge amounts of data, which means you need high speed networking to process that information.”
Processing data as – and when – captured is known as ‘edge processing’, which runs on high compute hardware integrated into each vehicle.
“This ‘processing at the edge’ – nobody else is doing that. It’s an international first,” Gallagher says.
Equipped with built‑in health checks, this technology constantly monitors whether sensors are recording correctly and whether any links have been missed.
Supported by a satellite internet connection, this data is ingested into a new AWS cloud‑hosted database.
A database of this design is capable of handling massive volumes of pavement and imagery data, while also processing complex queries across multiple data types.
It’s technology such as this that has allowed the NTRO to transform what was once a three-month process into a 48-hour long process, Gallagher says.
“With these new technologies and fleet additions, we’ll be able to capture about three quarters as much data in the next financial year as we did in the previous decade.”
Digestible data
Understanding that such complex data is only effective when fully understood, the NTRO set out to establish a visualisation portal to improve transparency and cohesiveness.
The visualisation platform gives road owners a map-based view of their entire network, showing which roads have been surveyed and allowing them to filter by project, date, and road class. For each section of road, it surfaces detailed condition data such as roughness, rutting, texture, cracking, patches and potholes, as well as pavement scans, structural deflection charts and linked road images.
Users can zoom from network level down to five‑metre segments, check data quality and completeness, and then export exactly the metrics and formats they need for their own systems.
“The system is quite intuitive. That was one of the desired goals. So, everything from the planning of the routes, through to the driving of the vehicles and the actual viewing and exporting of the data, anyone can pick it up pretty quickly,” Gallagher says.
“The system was developed based on client feedback, so it was about trying to make it easy for them to see their data – particularly for the LGAs. Obviously, the big road authorities may have their own asset management and visualisation systems, but a lot of the LGAs don’t, and this is something that we built to help them with the display of data as required.”
As aforementioned, the NTRO is seeing strong international interest in its vehicles and technology, with plans to build and develop locally before deploying across Australia and around the globe.
“There’s huge potential to provide these new insights to our clients that we haven’t been capable of delivering previously,” Gallagher says.
“That’s really what excites me the most.”
This article was originally published in the March edition of our magazine. To read the magazine, click here.
