Australian Transport Research Cloud (ATRC)

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) is providing 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 provides streamlined access to the key datasets and open source analysis and modelling tools necessary to address complex transport issues facing our cities, and delivers the requisite knowledge base to inform smarter transport management, planning and policy making.

It also creates 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 built on existing Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (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 wellbeing.

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 were:

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