Freight data catalogue
The freight data catalogue is a curated catalogue of high-value and quality freight datasets and metadata. It improves the availability of government data, and allows industry, government, researchers and others to easily find, use, and share open data.
Benefits
- Access to a curated selection of the best open government data in one place
- A national, harmonised (unified) and searchable freight-data ecosystem
- Greater clarity around data owner and custodianship roles and responsibilities
- Increased data availability and accessibility and efficiency for planning and decision-making
Outputs
- Open freight datasets: Explore the freight data catalogue
- Private freight datasets: Contact the NFDH team to find out more
National Freight and Supply Chain Strategy reporting
The National Freight and Supply Chain Strategy sets an agenda for coordinated and well-planned government and industry action across all freight modes to 2040 and beyond. This project supports the ongoing measuring, monitoring and reporting of Australia’s freight performance.
For more information on the Strategy visit the Freight Australia website or contact FreightStrategy@infrastructure.gov.au.
Benefits
- Improved understanding of Australia’s freight performance over time
- Benchmarking for international competitiveness
Outputs
- Freight Performance Dashboard
- National Freight and Supply Chain Strategy KPI Dashboard Proof of Concept
Road data
This project involves collecting and benchmarking nationally consistent data to track Australia's road network. The data can help to find bottlenecks, target planning, and prioritise investment decisions.
Road agencies are sharing their road condition and expenditure data with us, and we are supporting the development of National Service Level Standards (NSLS) for Roads, under the Heavy Vehicle Road Reform national agenda.
Benefits
- Nationally consistent, harmonised (unified), and secure data to enable efficient national benchmarking through the NSLS
- Better understanding of the impacts of road condition, number and types of vehicles and vehicle operating cost models for prioritisation of road investment projects
Outputs
- Foundational roads data dictionaries and more efficient ‘touch once’ data collection and sharing from jurisdictions to various national stakeholders
- Rest Area Location and Facilities interactive
- Roadworks and Road Closures interactive
- Road Condition and Expenditure interactive
- Numbers of Trucks on Roads interactive
- Harmonised Traffic Counts interactive
- Nationally harmonised road datasets in the freight data catalogue, including:
Truck movement data
Many trucks already report their location to vehicle owners. This project involves exploring the benefits of and collecting truck movement data to help us respond to the needs of road network stakeholders and trucking operators. It also expands on current data-sharing agreements and close collaborations with freight, logistics and vehicle tracking stakeholders, and uses de-identified movement data to build a picture of the roads and rest stops trucks use to inform government investment and policy decisions.
Benefits
- Greater collaboration and innovation to better understand truck movement
- Efficient and secure data sharing agreements
- A stable, secure, fit-for-purpose platform to enable automated data sharing between industry and government
- Development of a dataset, data dictionary, and data architecture for efficient truck location-data exchange
- Consistent evidence-based congestion insights
- Improved understanding of truck rest stop usage and truck movements into and out of ports
Outputs
Customs data
This project involves working closely with the Australian Border Force (ABF) on sharing more detailed import and export data by establishing a new data sharing agreement and automated data pipeline. The NFDH and BITRE will centrally manage data quality checks and improvements, and securely on-share the data to agreed trusted users through additional sharing agreements.
Benefits
- Detailed information on what is in containers and the commodities that are flowing in and out of Australia's ports
- Better information for planning and infrastructure investments
- Improved data quality and efficiencies
- Savings in data management
- Reduction of duplication across data users
- Data for once-off origin and destination supply chain studies done by ports and jurisdictions
Outputs
- New data sharing agreements with ABF and trusted users
- Imports and Exports interactive using ABS open data
- Volume vs Value interactive using ABS open data
- Import and Export Containerised Merchandise Projections using the Department of Home Affairs' Integrated Cargo System
- Import and Export Containerised Merchandise Projections by Port using the Department of Home Affairs' Integrated Cargo System
Container data
This project involves working with port communities to share new data for accurate benchmarking of container port performance and enhance BITRE's Waterline publications.
Benefits
- More relevant, accurate and up-to-date container performance measures in the Australian context
- Improved visibility of container movements through ports for strategic planning and reducing bottlenecks and pinch points
- Smarter and targeted investments to improve the performance of ports and connecting networks
Outputs
Domestic sea freight data
This project involves improving the usability of domestic sea freight data. It enhances BITRE’s Coastal Freight Survey, Coastal trading licencing, and Tasmanian Freight Equalisation Scheme.
Benefits
- Better domestic sea freight activity data
- Linking datasets for a more complete picture of domestic sea freight activity
- Improvements to current datasets to make them more useful for planning and decision-making (for example, data cleansing, refinement and harmonisation)
Outputs
- Updated coastal sea freight database
Supply chain benchmarking
Benchmarking is a key action under the National Freight and Supply Chain Strategy and provides insights into the performance of Australian supply chains. This project has developed a supply chain benchmarking dashboard that displays the outcomes of modelling Australia’s supply chains using CSIRO's Transport Network Strategic Investment Tool (TraNSIT).
For more information on the Strategy, visit the Freight Australia website or contact FreightStrategy@infrastructure.gov.au.
Benefits
- Modelling, analysis, evaluation and benchmarking of supply chain transport and logistics performance
- Better data for strategic policy and planning, investment and regulation
- Greater understanding of Australia's efficiency and international competitiveness
- Collaboration on priorities, challenges or key areas of interest
Outcomes
Rail data
This project involves collecting and benchmarking nationally consistent data to track Australia’s rail network. This may include aggregated data on train speed, tonnage and cargo type by routes and origin-destination. This information will enable industry and governments to better understand the role of rail in freight.
Benefits
- Better understanding of freight routes and train movements to support strategic planning and investment decisions to improve rail freight efficiency.
- Improved understanding of train delays, bottlenecks and network capacity.
- Inform industry participants of anomalies that may affect the supply chain.
- Identify multi-modal opportunities when used with other transportation data.
Outputs
- Ad hoc analysis upon request for government and private industry partners.
- Freight Train Movement Analytics interactive visualisations as a dashboard and maps.
- Freight Train Movement by Regions as a dashboard.
- Freight Train Movement datasets for the data catalogue.
- New data sharing agreements with railway operators to create a national coverage.
Forecasting freight demand
BITRE develops freight forecasts for Australia’s long-term strategic transport outlook. It focuses on future freight transport demand by transport mode (road, rail, sea, air and total), and includes national level data and a data breakdown (for example state, territory, and capital cities).
Benefits
- Making valuable government freight data open and accessible
- Informing industry and government decision making
- Documented, repeatable forecasting processes
Outputs
Freight consignment data exchange
This project promotes data sharing between freight and logistics operators across the supply chain. Manufacturers, freight operators and retailers share and record limited consignment (freight package) information. This project is currently conducting research and pilots to build a better understanding of existing industry systems, data standards and practices used to manage consignments.
Benefits
- Better visibility of freight consignment and movement data
- Identifying bottlenecks and improving supply predictability, efficiency, and productivity
- Reducing fatigue, errors, the need to keep inventory within the freight ecosystem
- Data and analysis to improve response times for unanticipated events
- Information for investment decision-making, freight demand forecasting, and policy development
Outputs
National Location Registry
This project collects freight delivery and pickup locations to create a National Location Registry (NLR) electronic 'address book', with information that includes access points, opening hours, dimension and weight limits, safety requirements, facility details and point of contacts. This project is a partnership between the NFDH, GS1 and industry.
Now that the NLR is in operation, we are calling upon all organisations, businesses, state and territory and local governments to input location data. Learn more about the benefits and access how-to-guides on the GS1 website.
Benefits
- Up to date and precise location information
- Reduces errors and ambiguity for system users
- Data for efficient deliveries and collections
- Increase participation, collaboration and innovation
- A dataset that can link to other NFDH datasets (for example, with ABF Integrated Cargo System data, to show which addresses are headquarters, rather than freight locations)
Outputs
Freight data standards
This project involves exploring existing freight data standards in use across Australia, as well as evaluate and review international best practice for data standardisation. It will explore and develop data standards to make internal and external data exchange easier.
Benefits
- Improved data exchange between data users and data providers
- Increased accessibility and usability of data leading to informed decision making to improve freight performance
Outputs
- See Data standards for more information
