Councils face many challenges when it comes to maintaining the road network. These challenges include ageing infrastructure, asset growth, increased community expectations, legislative compliance and a requirement to do more with less in a financially constrained environment. Moorabool Shire is typical of many local government areas. It has an extensive and growing road network, a large geographic area, changing traffic patterns along with a community with high expectations all with competing demands in the funding pie. Like most road authorities, we undertake road inspections as per our road management plan and the community certainly informs us of maintenance issues which are all used to inform maintenance activities. However, the process often leads to chasing maintenance issues and never really operating in a proactive space. So, how do we become more proactive?
Artificial Intelligence is a tool that Moorabool Shire has implemented to move our asset maintenance practices to a more proactive space. With an up to date view of defects on the road network, it can be used to prioritise where maintenance needs to be targeted and make more efficient use of available resources on the ground. Being an early adopter of the technology created some uncertainties and meant a due diligence process wasn't necessarily available. Notwithstanding this, Moorabool has acquired the AI technology and integrated it with it's maintenance management system and the data is being used to allocate maintenance tasks to field staff via tablets.
Not only is this a technology project, but a change management piece to ensure the various teams were involved in it's implementation. Whilst the technology side of things could be implemented and integrated, changing mindset and embedded practices was a major part of the journey.