Improving engineering governance for large infrastructure projects

The increased complexity of modern infrastructure projects together with the desire of governments to provide improved services to their citizens gives rise to the need for much better engineering governance capability and the ability to model system and user behaviour to ensure the desired increased level of service. Modelling all aspects of planned systems through the use of standardised architecture framework models that can be developed to provide the necessary insight across all aspects and levels of concern for the system(s) is an excellent approach for achieving this. This paper describes the initial phase of development of such a toolset for the Asset Standards Authority (ASA) of Transport for New South Wales (TfNSW) that will be used to ensure coordinated development activities between all divisions in the department, as well as with Planning NSW and the private sector providers for system design, implementation, maintenance and operation. The initial development described here particularly focuses on existing, current and future heavy rail projects, but continuing work is under way to extend and generalise the model so that it applies to all rail transport modes (rapid transit metro and light rail) and eventually to include all other TfNSW transport modes — buses, walkways, ferries, cycle ways, and roads. Furthermore, this paper details how the use of a metamodel for the architecture framework provides the rigour and abstraction necessary to allow this generalisation within the same model structure