Improving road freight outcomes with telematics data: A roadmap

High-quality freight and truck telematics data, appropriately collated and aggregated, can help better inform policy decisions and business operations across Australian road infrastructure and transport networks. Developing a tailored roadmap for efficiently and securely accessing and using truck telematics data to inform policy and planning was the aim of the Truck telematics: Technology review, policy options, roadmap project that iMOVE undertook with the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts (DITRDCA) and Queensland University of Technology (QUT)..

Background

Road freight-related data has historically been collected using a mix of large-scale sample surveys and road-side surveys/interviews, as well as classified traffic count and weigh-in-motion sensors.

These traditional methods can be expensive and, in the case of surveys, impose considerable burden on respondents. Advances in digital technology, wireless network communications and Global Positioning System (GPS)-based location services have led to increasing use of location-based tracking of freight vehicles.

This project brought together an interdisciplinary team of QUT researchers, with expertise in data architecture technologies and solution design, digital infrastructure strategy, transport planning, telematics data services and social justice. They also have a strong track record in successfully delivering industry relevant outcomes to design the proposed roadmap.

Objectives

The project developed a tailored roadmap for the governance of truck movement data that is primarily collected and used for the purposes of informing policy, planning and network operations, by systematically analysing current and future policy and data sharing landscape.
It will support the National Freight Data Hub (NFDH) goals of enhancing the collection and timely access to a wide range of data to improve strategic planning and day-to-day operations, evaluate the efficiency of the Australian freight network, and recommend data-driven means to improve its resilience.

The project aimed to work with industry, government agencies and regulators to increase the exchange of truck movement data between industry and government.

Many trucks in Australia already collect and report telematics data to the vehicle owner. Leveraging existing telematics data collection mechanisms. “… is potentially more cost-effective, provides richer detail and imposes less burden on stakeholders than traditional data collection methods.”

Fundamentals of telematics

Telematics is the use of communications and Information Technology (IT) to store, receive and transmit status information from remote objects, spread across a network. It can take advantage of GPS data as well as mobile, satellite and Internet of Things (IoT) communications networks.

In transport, telematics can involve fitting each vehicle or trailer with multiple sensors to monitor and report current vehicle status. Sensor information can include geo-stamped and time-stamped observations of vehicle speed, heading, breaking, G-forces and swerving, as well as vehicle performance data such as engine status, hydraulics, axle, mass, emissions and any warnings.

Workshops

A November 2023 Telematics Future Needs workshop included more than 40 in-person and online participants, primarily from Australian state and federal government agencies.

Participants agreed that it is important to understand how roads are used by heavy vehicles (i.e. vehicles with a gross vehicle mass (GVM) or aggregate trailer mass (ATM) of more than 4.5 tonnes). Heavy vehicle road use is a key driver of road maintenance, rehabilitation and construction expenditure requirements.

Participants agreed that any telematics implementation should keep costs for transport operators down and not add additional complexity to existing requirements.

Participants also recognised the legislated use of telematics for regulatory purposes must address data usage, privacy, commercial-in-confidence and data security issues in order to maintain the trust of industry and the community.

There is a significant responsibility to ensure data is used ethically, and that it is governed and managed based on a well-defined framework that protects privacy and confidentiality, whilst making data accessible for stakeholders and freight partners.

Use cases for telematics data

The Telematics Future Needs workshop identified 16 use cases for telematics data, under four broad categories:

1. Road operations
2. Strategic network planning
3. Safety, operator and fleet management
4. Regulatory compliance and enforcement

The 16 uses cases, grouped by broad category, are listed in the following table.

Workshop participants expressed strong interest in improving the efficiency of fleet management, such as servicing trailers at the optimal time, and ensuring tyre pressures on large combinations are monitored to prevent blowouts.

Analysis of past use in various conditions may be able to supply road users with expected conditions, safety concerns, alternate routes or additional time to navigate. This could then be applied to navigation software so that users can make informed decisions.

Meanwhile, compliance monitoring would ensure adherence to authorised routes by operators of heavy, oversize, and overmass vehicles.

BITRE technology review

BITRE (Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics )provides economic analysis, research and statistics on infrastructure and transport to inform both Australian Government policy development and wider community understanding. BITRE is part of DITRDCA.

BITRE has been investigating the suitability of aggregated heavy vehicle telematics data for informing road freight related policy and planning. Policy and planning-related indicators that telematics data could potentially provide include:

• regular measures of total truck use in Australia
• nationally-consistent measures of congestion experienced by freight vehicles
• annual estimates of origin-destination truck movements
• measures of truck vehicle rest stop utilisation.

Using a sample of industry telematics data, BITRE has developed IT architecture to transform raw telematics data into freight vehicle trip and road usage information.

QUT were also tasked with reviewing BITRE’s data needs and system requirements. QUT’s assessment revealed that the majority of BITRE telematics data use cases require only deferred data access – real-time access by BITRE is unlikely to be necessary.

QUT noted BITRE’s current architecture is largely dependent on manual ingestion of data, which creates time, cost and data quality issues. On a positive note, BITRE’s architecture has the advantage of being readily horizontally scalable. Any overhaul of the BITRE data architecture would need to consider ingestion, pre-processing and data standardisation, linkage with other data sources, analysis, and dissemination to authorised users.

QUT also observed that evidentiary standard raw telematics data is collected by Transport Certification Australia (TCA), through its RIM (Road Infrastructure Management) Industry-led Data-Sharing Schemes (AUS) and since BITRE commenced its efforts, TCA-collected data has become available to authorised data users. QUT noted there is potential for BITRE to become an authorised user of TCA data.

Roadmap

The Truck Movement Data Project aimed to better understand BITRE’s data needs and develop a roadmap for efficiently acquiring, managing and using truck telematics data to meet required policy and planning information needs.

In its recommendations, QUT noted identified desirable features of a data sharing model should include:

• all available telematics data be standardised with well-defined semantics
• long-standing agreements be established covering data acquisition and governance
• a federated data repository with real-time analytical capabilities

In terms of data architecture, socio-legal considerations around data governance, sharing, privacy, access and use are yet to be formulated and actioned but will need to be in place. A desirable future state would include:

• Service providers managing the ingestion of their own clients’ data, managing dashboards, and reporting to their own clients
• A federated database with participants sharing some sections of their own database
• Horizontally-scaled processing architecture to meet demand for policy and planning-related measures
• API-based data transfer to facilitate manual and automatic publication of data/analysis, as well as allowing authorised user query/reporting access.

Conclusions and findings

The report summarises the current freight vehicle telematics data landscape and finds that there appears to be a broad level of support for data sharing between government departments and agencies, to improve the quality of the evidence base for future planning and policy-making.

The range of use cases that can be conducted with even basic telematics data is already quite extensive. A set of 16 use cases were identified, under the four broad categories of: Road operations, Strategic network planning, Safety, operator & fleet management and Regulatory compliance and enforcement.

In each category, the report found that key legal, regulatory and ethical considerations must be addressed, as well as privacy considerations at all levels.

Principles of privacy-by-design and blockchain-based data privacy technologies could be used to address privacy concerns. It is also important to consider the extent to which there is a social licence to broadly share telematics data.

The roadmap points out the need for a standard schema for telematics data, to ensure well-defined semantics are captured for data typically collected by transponders across various data providers. This will significantly enhance the insights gained from existing data collections.

The roadmap highlights the benefits of entering into long-standing agreements for data acquisition and sharing with selective aggregators and state counterparts. It envisions the development of an API-supported data-sharing portal, to allow for both scheduled and on-demand data uploads by service providers and on-demand, generation and download of parameterised reports.

Expected project impacts

A spokesperson for the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts (DITRDCA) noted that ‘the iMOVE project findings and recommendations have helped it clarify its strengths and role in the collection and use of telematics data, identify opportunities for collaboration with other stakeholders and prioritise its next steps’. The Department is grateful to QUT’s team for its structured, thorough and comprehensive exploration of the issues involved.

Final report

A final report has been produced, but is for internal use only.