[National Innovation Challenge] Productivity: Develop an engineering project management software to identify, recognise & track changes and comments b/w different revisions of traffic control plans with smart search tool plug-in

For review of traffic control plans (TCPs) and drawings (~400 plans/month), LTA’s traffic engineers have to go through the tedious, time-consuming and error-prone process of cross-referencing from three road design manuals, to ensure that the TCPs are ready for approval/endorsement.

Please refer to the attachments for, a) Latest Set of Drawing, b) Previous Set of Drawing and c) Response Sheet 

Additional time need to be spent correcting design errors when internal/ external TCPs fail to comply with the standards and requirements of the road design manuals. There are a total of three design manuals that LTA’s traffic engineers have to check the TCPs against while planning traffic arrangements:

• Civil Design Criteria (CDC)
• Standard Design of Road Elements (SDRE)
• Code of Practice (COP) for Traffic Control at Work Zone

For each submission, besides reviewing the areas that have flagged previously, engineers must also review the entire drawing to assess for issues and inconsistencies with earlier submissions. This process to cross reference between submissions and review changes is very time consuming as each traffic drawing includes significant number of traffic features.

Subsequently, engineers would then provide comments directly on the traffic control plans, and transfer these comments into a separate response sheet for tracking and follow-up actions by Contractors/ Consultants. This tracking process is error-prone and time-consuming. Often, comments provided in earlier submissions were not ccaptured/translated to latest revised plan, and LTA traffic engineers have to duplicate their earlier comments into the response sheet. 

Previous attempted solutions include:

• PDF Editor: Unable to track comments for different drawings (different revisions)
• Pen-Tablet monitor: To ease the cross referencing of 3 different documents

Strategic importance of the project:

• Use of technology to integrate different documents in one common platform to ease the reviewing processing and improve overall work efficiency
• Use of digital tools to identify and highlight deviations between different versions of drawings to minimise human errors and time spent 
• Synergising with Industry Players for quicker turnaround in review & approval process of traffic control plans
• Use of technology for knowledge management 

To improve efficiency of the review & approval of traffic control plans by 20%. 

• Able to cross- reference between traffic drawings (i.e in pdf format) and identify the differences between the different revisions
• Allow tabulation and tracking of comments, in structured format, together with the pdf drawings in one single platform
• Comments and correspondence can be extracted in structured format, i.e in table form, for review and reference
• Trial phase to include nominated vendors/designers/contractors.
• Develop a smart search tool plug-in to provide user with information (design standards and requirements) from various road design manuals
• Solution should be compatible and have the capability for integration with other government systems such as WOG or LTA central software, by 2023
• Solution is able to read digital files in PDF format, therefore avoiding the likelihood of reviewing PDFs without selectable elements, for example, PDFs converted from picture files (e.g. JPEG)

• Proposed solution should be able to review more than 400 TCPs per month.
• Open to review solution providers’ commercial plan.
• Solution should be developed and ready for commercial deployment by 2023.
• Solution provider to include proposed business/commercial model(s) of the solution in the proposal

9 months from project commencement

This challenge statement is under the (National Innovation Challenge (NIC) and calls for startups, SMEs, IHLs and RIs to tackle sectoral challenges for adoption at scale. Awarded participants stand to benefit from up to S$2 million in co-funding grant support of NIC funding at various stages from the prototype, deployment to adoption.