Many trucks across the Australian fleet automatically and accurately report their location at regular intervals to the vehicle owner. When combined and de-identified, this rich information on where trucks are travelling, where they are stopping and where they experience congestion on the roads, can assist in informing policy decisions.

The project will involve close collaboration with freight, logistics and vehicle tracking stakeholders to:

1. Increase data shared with the Hub
2. Harmonise and combine data from various sources
3. Discover where common value can be generated for both providers and users of relevant data.

This project continues and expands existing voluntary data sharing agreements between the Hub and key industry stakeholders, which includes a pilot data management system and published analyses on congestion, the origin and destination of trucks and the impact of COVID-19 on urban freight efficiency.

This project addresses enduring questions 2, 3, 5 and 10.

Please contact us if you would like to be updated on, or involved in, the development of this project.

Outcomes

This project will:

• Increase the amount of truck movement data being exchanged between industry and governments, with the goal of obtaining a representative sample of Australian truck telematics.
• Lead collaboration and drive connections with industry to find innovative ways that the exchange of truck movement data can be used for mutual benefit. This will facilitate the delivery of:
  1. a nationally consistent, evidence-based congestion metric
  2. improved trucks rest stop usage telematics
  3. a stable, ongoing evidence base of truck movements into and out of ports.
• Develop efficient, secure data sharing agreements and a stable, secure, fit-for-purpose platform to enable automated sharing of this type of 'big data' between industry and governments.
• Lead the development of a clear and feasible 'foundation' data set and data dictionary, and 'future proof' data architecture that enables truck location data to be exchanged efficiently (and combined with other data if agreed by participants in future).

Initial Planned Outputs

• Interim Technology
• Foundation dataset
• Data acquisition analysis and report
• Template Data Sharing Agreement
• Refined sharing arrangements with existing BITRE data contributors
• Formalised sharing arrangements with stakeholders
• Dataset release to catalogue and new data products

Related data projects:

• Road Data Project
• Freight Data Standards Project
• TCA National Telematics Framework applications and schemes
• ALC National Freight Data Standard
• National Heavy Vehicle Charging Pilot
• NTC National Heavy Vehicle Law Review and National Service Level Standards
• Safety and Productivity Program
• NTC Government Access to Vehicle Generated Data Project
• Survey of Motor Vehicle Use replacement project
• Heavy Vehicle Infrastructure Asset Registers
• Road freight telematics data collection
• Truck Telematics
• Freight Through COVID-19

Data Sources

Two sources of telematics data are visualised on the prototype website: telematics data provided to the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics (BITRE) and telematics data provided to Transport Certification Australia (TCA).

Industry provides telematics data to the Hub voluntarily. The two largest providers are Toll Group and Australia Post. Data is protected through data sharing agreements that establish how the data is to be stored, accessed, analysed and published, to ensure data security and protect commercial sensitivity.

TCA administers the Intelligent Access Program (IAP), which is for Higher Mass Limit vehicles, and the National Telematics Framework. TCA is independent from the government and collects industry telematics data. By de-identifying and aggregating the data, TAC provides certainty to stakeholders that transport operator and vehicle-specific data is protected from disclosure to other parties, commercially sensitive information is securely managed, and privacy-by-design principles are upheld. For further information please visit the TCA website.

Growing the small BITRE sample, to make it more representative of the heavy vehicle fleet, is a priority as it will improve the accuracy and usefulness of the visualisations. The contributions of data on high-mass vehicles from the IAP, and the Toll Group and Australia Post fleets are helping us to achieve this. We are seeking to work with more fleet operators of both heavy trucks and light commercial vehicles moving freight to add more data. This data will be protected through similar data sharing agreements on storage, accessibility, and how it is to be analysed and published, to protect commercial sensitivity. This contribution from the industry will help answer industry needs with new insights from the data. If you are interested in participating please get in touch.

How telematics data can be used:

• Enables industry to vary billing and delivery windows based on congestion factors at different times of day.
• Facilitating truck fleet optimisation.
• Improving strategic investment decisions by industry and governments by enabling usage trends and patterns to be understood.
• Enabling transport network planners to improve their evidence base of numbers and types of trucks using the network, to develop strong business cases for where and when road maintenance and upgrade investments will provide the greatest value.
• Enabling road managers to understand where heavy vehicles are travelling and in what numbers on the roads, to control and promote road access in a detailed way depending on the condition of the road.
• Enabling road safety managers to track and connect information about safety incidents, understand patterns and safety issues, and improve safety outcomes.
• Enabling local councils to access more complete and up to date information about their freight networks, including links with other local government areas.
• The visualisations are not used for compliance purposes.
• Another strength of the data is that it provides a historic record of freight congestion. Other data and mapping services only provide short-lived real time congestion information on our roads.

Limitations

See About Page for detail on the current data limitations of this project.