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Issue 4
The preceding pages have highlighted some of the content from NTRO’s 2023 International Conference. This article outlines some of the highlights of the program for the 2025 edition of the conference.
When we settled on the Conference theme, we were guided by a number of factors:
These combined were the basis of selecting the conference theme: The Transport Revolution – Solutions led by Innovation.
“We’re all in this together” is nowhere more true than in transportation, globally. The conference aims to be a focal point for furthering a global community of practice to transform a transport system with strong roots in the 19th century into a system that will serve our communities well into the 22nd century.
It does this in two ways:
Bringing together experts from around the globe to ensure that all experience is available to delegates
Having a format that allows for the more traditional explanation of new knowledge, but also for all the delegates to learn from each other’s experiences.
Conventionally, the conference comprises both plenary session for all delegates and paper and workshop sessions in two or three parallel streams.
In the plenary sessions, we have brought together highly experienced local and international speakers to speak and share their experiences on a range of topics, and to provoke the new thinking that any revolution requires. These sessions also allow questions and answers, through which members of the audience can share and learn from one another.
The Plenary sessions scheduled for the Conference are:
Paper sessions are a mix of original papers offered and accepted for presentation and invited papers which complement one another and provide operational context and the new ideas addressing them.
The conference paper sessions scheduled for the conference are:
This session unpacks some ideas relating to the future of Asset performance, from strategic thinking, to tackling emerging problems and maximising the use of data and information.
Pavement performance is becoming ever more complex with new materials and new requirements the order of the day. This session unpacks a small selection of the research and development being done on improving pavement performance and ensuring that innovations represent progress in doing more with the same level of resources.
The safety of road users is paramount, but increasingly trending in the wrong direction in terms of lives lost and serious injuries. Most other safety conferences focus primarily on speed reduction, which is a sign that the Safe System approach is not doing what it was intended to do – create a safe system. These two sessions tackle the poorly understood role of culture in road safety, and start the essential conversation about revolutionizing what we do in order to systematically reduce the toll.
Sustainability and decarbonisation touch every level of transport – from the design, the use and re-use of materials to the design of large transport tasks and systems. The all-embracing nature of this imperative is reflected in the papers that will be presented across these sessions. Developments in materials technology, use of Intelligent Transport Systems, the role of standards and specifications and more are all covered.
This session comprises a collection of views of road agencies and researchers on innovation. The agencies reflect on the need for innovation and what they have and are doing to bring about change, while the researchers use specific aspects of transport to reflect on what can be done.
Bitumen and asphalt are very effective in protecting road assets, but have some challenges. There is a large body of work being done to make them even better, to make them more sustainable and to improve the value for money proposition. Highlights of just some of this work are covered.
The greatest challenge for the global mobility industry is to not mis or make suboptimal use of the opportunities for radical change in how we move people and goods. Such changes need an ecosystem that allows development of trust in the technology. This session looks at a number of aspects of unpacking the opportunity-risk puzzle.
As transport and infrastructure systems become more complex, the fundamental need for timely, reliable and trusted data grows exponentially so system managers can examine the relevant outcomes and match those to observed inputs. The content of these two sessions highlights the benefits of routine use of technology, software developments and data to provide confidence as to assets and their performance. In addition, software, hardware and engineering innovations combined represent a must-not-miss opportunity to create data capture, data processing and data interrogation platforms that will meet the long-term needs of the transport and infrastructure sector. This is the focus of the Next Generation Digital Measurements workshop.
Innovation requires more than just new knowledge. It also requires pathways for converting the knowledge into implementable outcomes and creating the environment which makes it easier to adopt them. The aim of this workshop is to provide some examples of what can be done in this regard and allow all participants to share their experiences with one another.
Connected and Autonomous vehicles offer an opportunity to re-imagine transport systems and task rather than adjust just them. As part of the re-imagining, there is a need to ensure that infrastructure is suited to the re-imagined world as far as is possible. This workshop will aim to unpack some critical aspects of infrastructure that can and should change, as well as the implementation path.
