The Australian Transport Research Cloud

Informing smarter transport planning and policymaking.
Sydney Harbour Bridge evening rush hour
Who will benefit
Researchers, planners, policymakers

The Challenge

Currently, transport data in Australia is notoriously difficult to find, access and use. Using these datasets within tools requires significant wrangling and training to set up and obtain meaningful results. 

This can become particularly challenging when investigating problems at scale, such as large metropolitan cities or towns, which may require substantial cloud-based storage and/or compute resources.

The Response

The Australian Transport Research Cloud (ATRC) will provide transport researchers, planners, policy and decision makers — from academia, government and industry — with a technical platform that offers data and tools to accelerate transport research and impacts across Australia.

The ATRC’s capabilities will support the needs of researchers focusing on passenger transport, specifically road and rail modes. 

It will provide streamlined access to the key datasets and open source analysis and modelling tools necessary to address complex transport issues facing our cities and will deliver the requisite knowledge base to inform smarter transport management, planning and policy making.

It will also create opportunities for collaboration and the development of new tools, allowing resources to come together in a flexible and effective way that will ensure the platform’s sustainability into the future.

This is a collaborative project led by the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) and supported by the ARDC, and will build on the existing AURIN platform.

Who Will Benefit

The ATRC platform will support Australian transport researchers through high-value transport data, cutting-edge analytics and modelling tools and workflow creation capabilities. 

The evidence-based research will help all levels of government enhance their planning of, and investment in, transport infrastructure and services. 

This platform will also benefit the wider community by contributing to government goals to:

  • make public transport more effective and efficient
  • reduce road congestion, commute times and vehicle emissions
  • improve national productivity and international competitiveness
  • reduce air pollution, noise pollution and heat islands
  • improve population health and well-being.

The Partners

The ATRC is a collaboration between Australian transport researchers, planners and policy makers (from government, industry and the private sector), AURIN and the ARDC.

Our partners are:

  • AURIN
  • University of Melbourne
  • University of NSW
  • University of Sydney
  • Monash University
  • The University of Queensland
  • University of Western Australia
  • HERE Technologies.

Target Outcomes

This project will provide a common platform comprising transport data, tools, storage and computing power to support the needs of the Australian transport research community, by extending the existing AURIN platform.  

The ATRC will commence testing in 2022, with the goal of making the platform operational by mid-2023.

The ATRC will provide a new capability for Australian transport researchers to collaborate and apply an array of analysis and transport modelling tools to an unprecedented curated collection of FAIR high-value datasets, informing planning of and investment in transport infrastructure and services.

ATRC is coming soon, learn more via AURIN.

Contact the ARDC

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Timeframe

March 2020 to March 2023

Current Phase

Complete

ARDC Co-investment

$1,482,000

Project lead

Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN)