Transport SA

The Client

Transport SA's focus has moved from road management to transport management, and now services all areas of transport, including air, rail, marine, freight, vehicle registration and licensing, and of course roads.

The roles of Transport SA are to:

 Transport SA
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  • advise and support the Minister for Transport and play a leading role in the development of policy for the whole transport system;
  • administer the State law relating to air, marine, rail and road transport;
  • operate and maintain Transport SA controlled transport assets;
  • inform, educate and communicate with users of the transport system;
  • to improve whole of system performance;
  • create, improve and renew transport system assets

The Challenges

To develop a means for TransportSA's Maintenance Services Section technicians to record road defects whilst out in the field.

To remove the need for re-entry of the defects into TransportSA's Activity Based Management Information System (ABMIS) upon the technician's return from the field.

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The Solution

SRA developed a Field Defects application for hand-held mobile devices such as the iPAQ Pocket PC. Hand-held devices are far more convenient for the technicians to carry around than a laptop computer.

The Field Defects application enables the technicians to capture all relevant field defect information for their specific inspection locations. The details are stored in an Oracle Lite database on the mobile device. Upon return from the field, the technician connects the mobile device to a PC that is connected to the main ABMIS database through TransportSA's network. The defects are then synchronised with the ABMIS database at the push of a button so that all ABMIS users can view them.

If the Field Defects application has been updated, it is downloaded to the mobile device at the same time as the data is being synchronised. The latest codes, locations and road details are also downloaded to the mobile device so that the data being entered by the technicians can be validated immediately on the device.

The subset of data that is downloaded to each technician's mobile device is controlled by a series of parameters specific to the given technician so they are only storing the data they really need.

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The Technology

Oracle 8i RDBMS
Oracle 9i Lite
Oracle Mobile Server
Microsoft eMbedded Visual Basic

The Services

Project Management
User Interface Design
Database Design
Technical Development
System Documentation
Testing
Training

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