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The National Transport Research Organisation hosted Ports Australia's Engineering and Asset Management Committee for a tour of its Melbourne headquarters.
Ports Australia's Zara Bryan sat down with Executive Director Ports and Airports Jason Sprott to learn how NTRO is driving the future of transport across Australia/NZ, collaborating internationally and providing data-driven insights into asset management.
The NTRO is a proud member of Ports Australia. Find out more about NTRO here.
TRANSCRIPT
Hi, I'm Jason Sprott, the Executive Director for Ports and Airports for the National Transport Research Organisation.
We're an organisation that's focused on transport infrastructure and improving transport infrastructure outcomes.
We have, operations across roads, rail, ports and airports. Really happy to have the Ports Australia Engineering and Asset Management working group come through today here in our Melbourne headquarters, we were able to show them our national materials laboratory that we're standing in and also have a couple of presentations on infrastructure measurements and how we're making a step change in measuring infrastructure and then helping clients manage that infrastructure.
In terms of collaboration, our industry has come together and I think Ports Australia has been instrumental in bringing our industry together to help people talk to each other about lessons learned or good experience.
I think we're collaborating more internationally as well. And we're certainly focused on learning internationally about, you know, what is best practice over there and how can we then apply that in Australia.
We've been working internationally recently, I’ve been leading a program of work in the Kingdom of Tonga across our roads, ports and aviation. And we're getting some really good outcomes across their infrastructure.
But importantly, it's really about the people of Tonga and helping them uplift as a nation, and helping them really uplift their skills as well.
So we have a really strong training and development component to that work across the assets and the infrastructure that they have.
We also, of course, offer that training and development capability here in Australia and across into New Zealand as well.
So in terms of sustainability, we work everything from the policy level, helping organisations write sustainability plans and strategies and undertake materiality assessments right down to materials being used in transport infrastructure.
One of the big challenges is, of course, is decarbonising infrastructure. And we've got the people here in the lab, particularly, who can test a whole range of products that are being used in infrastructure to help ports and other infrastructure managers decarbonise their infrastructure outcomes.
I think the beauty of this organisation is that we can actually do the testing and rigorously test materials before they're applied out into the field.
There's a whole lot of work going on creating better data and collecting better data about infrastructure.
we have a saying here, if you don't measure it, you can't manage it. So we're really focused on really capturing really good data to help port entities, port operators, port terminals, understand the current state of their infrastructure and then how we can then help them asset manage that going forward.
The advancements in data is exponential. We've got people here focused in the AI space now, that is bringing a whole number of data sets to the table that we haven't had previously.
It provides ports with insights in terms of where their most pressing issues are so that they can then, you know, focus their investment in those areas.
If any of the members of the port community more generally would like some assistance with transport infrastructure issues or sustainability issues, or managing or measuring their infrastructure, they can certainly reach out.
And, everyone from the port industry is, of course, welcome to come through, here for a tour at any time as well.
