The Australian road network is a constantly shifting beast. Roadworks, reroutes, closures and crashes mean the route truck drivers use to get from point A to point B on any given day could be significantly different the next.
News of necessary truck rerouting or impending roadworks emerges every day, whether it be through the NHVR, local councils and shires, or state and federal government information, but how are these roads and routes chosen?
While it used to be as simple as looking at a map and figuring a workaround, such is the demand of Australia’s freight task and growing regulatory oversight that any inefficiency that can be taken out of transport, is attempted to be removed.
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, more commonly known as the CSIRO, has been utilising science to improve the lives of everyday Australians in often unseen and unheard manners for decades.
You may know it as the organisation that is responsible for the development of early Wi-Fi technology, or the production of the polymer notes that are seen in every wallet and purse across the Australia today.
You might even know it as the inventor of Aerogard.
Like almost all other aspects of life, the CSIRO has its fingerprints on the Australian transport industry through its Transport Network Strategic Investment Tool, otherwise known as TraNSIT.
TraNSIT has used scientific modelling to improve supply chain efficiency in Australia since 2012, where it was initially utilised to help improve the transport of cattle in regional Queensland.
Now, it produces a detailed map and finds the most cost-effective route for trucks to travel around the country, where it takes into account travel distance and time, vehicle configuration, road conditions, driver fatigue regulations and vehicle decoupling costs into its assessments.
It now accommodates well over 200 commodities and influences over 25 million truck and 200,000 rail journeys every year.
CSIRO Senior Principal Research Scientist Andrew Higgins leads the team in charge of developing and applying the TraNSIT modelling, and he spoke to ATN about the continued application of the system in a real-world sense.
“What TraNSIT does it is maps out the movements of freight from their specific origin destinations,” he says. “So, that can be a farm paddock through to a processor, to a storage facility and then through export ports, distribution centres, and through to retail markets.
“Through that mapping we’re at road and rail; we’ve added shipping, and we have to add air freight.
“It takes into account the sort of vehicle that is being used along the way, and it takes into account the operating costs of that vehicle.
“For example, you might start from an origin with an A-Double vehicle, you go so far and then you may need to decouple down to a semi-trailer.
“It also considers all the different variables that are associated with running a vehicle including cost components and fatigue guidelines, and by doing that it gives us the transport cost and the likely routes it will take in order to give us an understanding of what is moving and where in our network.
“It was originally developed for livestock transport because that’s an industry with very long-distance supply chains and they were looking for an evidence-based tool that uses quality industry data to give information in order to advise the best investments to reduce costs of roads.
“That then comes back into advising where to upgrade roads and infrastructure, whether that be sealing roads or strengthening them so larger trucks can travel on them.”
That rapid growth over the last decade from cattle transport to the multi-modal, multi-commodity behemoth is showing few signs of slowing down though.
As Higgins mentioned, the next step for expansion of the modelling is into air freight, and it has already been used to help quantify the benefits of the construction of Inland Rail from a freight movement perspective.
“Although it was originally set up for agriculture it has since been expanded to cover about 220-odd commodities across major sectors,” Higgins continues.
“The more recent ones include constructive materials, the transport of medicine and getting into some critical commodities.
“We started off with the really heavy, big, bulky freight and we’re now getting into some of the higher value, higher criticality freight that doesn’t necessarily take up too many vehicles on the road.
“We look at the transport system as quite agnostic. It’s an integrated road and rail network with tactical intermodal facilities with loading, unloading and storage.
“By building that bigger picture it allows us to test broader scenarios around ‘what happens if there are major floods?’.
“We recently did some applications in North Queensland where the Bruce Highway was damaged north of Townsville looking at what the actual freight movements looked like on the various detours in terms of costs, delays and so forth.
“It provides really important information to allow government agencies to be able to use that to try and get a step ahead in terms of recovery and response efforts following major disruption events.”
That recent flooding in North and Far North Queensland Higgins mentioned is, unfortunately, not the only natural weather event to have smashed Australian supply chains in recent weeks.
The landfall and associated flooding from Tropical Cyclone Zelia near Port Hedland closed huge sections of Western Australia’s Great Northern Highway and surrounding freight routes, all but cutting off several regional communities and towns until repairs could be carried out.
Every day at about 8:30am TraNSIT will produce a report showcasing the closed and disrupted roads across Australia and predict the cost of those disruptions.
These closures are split into two categories, either freight must take a detour, or freight simply cannot get through.
In the case of the closed Great Northern Highway, freight simply could not get through the closures. There were no available detours, and road transport in the region just had to wait.
Higgins has supplied ATN with a copy of the TranSIT report dated February 21, 2025, which details the significant road closures caused by Tropical Cyclone Zelia and ongoing recovery from floods in North Queensland.
Major road closures to impact the days’ freight movement were, as expected, in northern Western Australia and the northern reaches of Queensland.
In addition, however, there was the closure of a major and multiple minor roads in the north-west reaches of Tasmania, west of Cradle Mountain.
Overall, the model predicted roughly 22,000 tonnes of freight would be blocked across the nation as a result of the significant road closures at a total cost of $6 million due to freight rerouting.
$2.1 million of that came in the minerals sector across Queensland and Tasmania, with the largest expected blockages coming in Queensland. 20,000 tonnes of incoming freight blocked across 37 local government areas (LGAs) in the state.
The blockages in Tasmania saw an expectation that 10.2 tonnes of freight would not reach its final destination in the Waratah-Wynyard LGA, 3.2 tonnes of which were essential food for supermarkets, leading to a fear that 54.4 per cent of the population was at risk of not being able to reach their daily dairy intake.
In Western Australia, 730 tonnes of freight was blocked, largely in the construction, livestock and fuel sectors.
According to Higgins, this type of data is shared with local and state government and regulatory decision-makers in order to best mitigate the impacts of lowered or lost efficiency of freight on everyday Australians.
“It’s viewed by state and territory governments and a lot of local governments – particularly regional – that I’m aware of,” Higgins says.
“We partner with state agencies for various application projects, and the state agencies responsible for transport have licences to use the TraNSIT web for their own applications.
“The TraNSIT web helps to provide additional capacity for greater utilisation across the country as opposed to working directly with each state agency on a project-by-project basis.
“It’s a bit of a capacity enabler that is also progressively being used by more local governments as well.
“It’s been used quite regularly to help inform roads programs and provide information and understanding the benefits of upgrading different roads in different locations, and what might be the benefits of reducing the cost of freight transport.
“It provides valuable information to help identify where to target investment in improving roads and looking ahead to areas you might want to use more rail in conjunction with roads.”
Although the transport sectors in Far North Queensland and Western Australia are recovering strongly from the flooding and cyclone events to have hit the respective regions earlier this year, another key event is set to further test TraNSIT modelling in the coming days.
With Tropical Cyclone Alfred lurking off the coast of Brisbane and expected to make landfall this week, the transport sector is preparing to batten down the hatches in the face of extensive wind and rain.
Although the cyclone is, at the time of writing, only a category 2 storm – for comparison Tropical Cyclone Zeila made landfall as a category 4 – its impact over a the densely populated south-east Queensland coastal region has the potential to cause widespread damage and delay to the region’s multi-modal freight network.
Freight re-routing and the exploration of multimodal solutions to aid in the eventual recovery efforts will be crucial, and the CSIRO will be there with TraNSIT to help inform key decision-makers of the impacts and fallout of the storm.
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