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Arup project celebrated at Queensland Spatial Excellence Awards

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Australasia Press Office
12 September 2016

On Friday, September 2, Arup’s Framework for Prioritising Road Segments Based on Incident Costs to Users project won both the Spatial Enablement category and the JM (Mac) Serisier Award for Overall Excellence at the 2016 Queensland Spatial Excellence Awards (QSEA).

Part of a Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR) initiative, this project aimed to identify priority investment locations for implementation of Intelligent Transport System (ITS) treatments throughout Queensland. Tasked with developing a framework able to model the impacts to road users from unplanned road closure events such as floods, crashes, landslides and bushfires, the Arup team utilised GIS as the key technology platform. This enabled summary statistics to be compiled spatially for 2,200 individual road segments throughout Queensland.

This project also included detailed diversion route modelling for all road segments. This enabled a more detailed assessment of road closure impacts by quantifying the distances and timeframes for possible diversion routes for road users, and the financial impacts associated with these diversions.

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This project presented many challenges as the framework was developed and tested. It was a great achievement for the project team to deliver a successful result. To then achieve recognition in the form of two QSEA awards is something to be proud of. ” Greg King GIS Consultant

This project made extensive use of multiple TMR spatial databases, as well as multiple openly available datasets. As such, this project is an example of the benefit that open data policies can provide in supporting data driven decision making.

Finalised in June 2016, the results from this project have already started to feed into investment planning across TMR districts, and the department is investigating how to implement the framework into the ITS asset capital submission process.

This project will now go on to represent Queensland at the Asia-Pacific Spatial Excellence Awards (APSEA) in the Spatial Enablement category, to be held in Sydney in April 2017.