Agentshap Wegen en Verkeer with Pàu.

Infrastructure

Agentschap Wegen en Verkeer (AWV) is the agency for roads and traffic for Belgium’s Flanders region. The authority manages around 7000 kilometers of roads and 7,700 kilometers of cycle lanes. Safe and efficient travel depends on AWV’s ability to record and share information about road projects, assets, and maintenance. AWV has recognized the value of applying modern digital solutions to paper-based processes and has sought out partners to realize its vision for the future. Pàu, a digital user experience agency based in Antwerp, has partnered with AWV to solve some of the authority’s challenges around automating data processing and sharing.

Challenge

Regional governments know that roadway construction and maintenance are not merely comprised of one-and-done tasks. They encompass a lifecycle of projects meant to extend the usability and safety of roads, highways, and cycling lanes. AWV had already moved beyond paper-based projects, but it needed more than digital files to enable true knowledge sharing. But data remained mostly siloed among different AWV departments, leading to information loss, double work, and projects or maintenance works that are not aligned.

How AWV and Pàu solved it with Forge

To eliminate the “islands” of data and create ongoing lifecycle records of roadway assets and projects, AWV enlisted development help from Pàu. AWV developers learned about the Forge platform at an Autodesk Accelerate event. They saw the potential to remove barriers between different types of data. Forge was perfectly suited to AWV’s goal of empowering many stakeholders to access and view roadway models and relevant project data, since the platform enables viewing via web-based browsers across devices, without additional costly software.

AWV and Pàu developers tapped the power of the Forge APIs to enable data sharing no matter the platforms and software on which that data was created. With the Model Derivative API, developers can extract OTL data from designs in multiple formats. The Design Automation API for Civil 3D enables us to extract additional geometry data using custom scripts. Using the Data Management API, the developers built a consistent way for stakeholders to view data in design context with the Viewer API across many software systems.

Forge highlights include the following:

• Enables knowledge sharing across teams.
• Automates processes for improving maintenance and safety of vital roadways.
• Eliminates siloed data sources that add time and costs to projects.