Visualising Change: Helping Sydney Trains Manage the Impact of Track Maintenance

Project background

Transport for NSW (Sydney Trains) with their partner Veitch Lister Consulting and Red Ant help smooth Sydney’s transport network everyday. The number of transport users is on the rise - up 12% since 2015. The task of optimising the transport network has never been more pressing.

At the same time, Transport for NSW has had access to rich data from the introduction of the Opal Ticketing System across the network in 2015. Like all big data projects, the challenge is to present insight from enormous data sets, that are accurate and help drive better decision making.

The problem - Big Data Visualisation

Sydney Trains needed a tool to help them visualise the impacts of changing a service plan across their network, and any planned track maintenance. Combined with selecting an optimum time and planning for sufficient replacement buses to service their customer demand. Previously this information was held by a few key people but it needed to be better understood by the entire team. They needed a repeatable, predictable way to manipulate the data inputs to plan for an optimised service plan that met their customer needs.

What we did - Digital Product Development

Through a series of discovery sessions we engaged with Sydney Trains and our partner Veitch Lister Consulting to understand what data was available and what decisions they needed to make as well as how to best present and interact with this information. We helped them to identify and prioritise their user stories and requirements for each sprint of development and created the roadmap for their Digital Product Development.

With the planning in place, execution was straightforward. We created a common data model and built an API around that so they could query a range of static and dynamic data sets combined with best in breed transport models. We built a visual front end that was engaging and could be used by the Sydney Trains service planning team.

Key Points

• Using our Digital Product Development methods we were able to engage a number of stakeholders including data owners, target user groups and consultants.
• Using our Agile Planning and Sprint Methodologies we were able to provide greater transparency and efficiency to stakeholders during the build phase.
• Using Digital Product Development processes we were able to help our clients make meaningful calculations from enormous data sets to make reliable predictions for critical planning.
• Building a custom tool can provide so much more flexibility while not paying for unnecessary features or expensive data analytic software subscriptions.

How can we help you?

If you need help to make use of your data or provide better projections or visualisations of data contact us for a free initial consult.