Main Roads Western Australia (Main Roads), the transport agency responsible for the state’s road network, and GHD Digital, the transformation business of professional services firm GHD, have announced a new joint use case to transform the management of technical document libraries through machine learning – specifically generative AI.
Using Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, this first-of-its-kind approach allows thousands of documents in Main Roads’ Technical Library to be searchable with plain language prompts, and their relationships organised and dynamically mapped. This will enable new processes to maintain consistency and currency of the library’s documents, resulting in significant productivity gains and risk mitigation.
The Main Roads Technical Library is a set of over 3,000 public-facing and inter-referenced policies, regulations, guidelines, standards and drawings, detailing how roads infrastructure is to be designed, developed, constructed and operated. Custodianship of these documents is distributed across many branches of Main Roads, including Network Operations Planning. When one document is edited, the changes must be communicated and reflected in all referencing documents to ensure accuracy and consistency. Currently, this process is time-consuming due to manual cross-referencing checks, and Network Operations Planning have been seeking an innovative alternative.
“Multi-million-dollar contracts and projects are dependent on the precision of our Technical Library,” said Bita Charehjoo, Network Operations Planning Manager at Main Roads. “Having spent many years developing and managing the policies, guidelines, specifications and technical drawings – and many hands-on hours checking the validity of edits and updates, there has to be a smarter, faster way of indexing and cataloguing documentation.”
Sarah Dods, Region Leader of Advanced Analytics and AI at GHD Digital, said: “This new generative AI approach seeks to automatically identify edits across impacted documents, draw inferences and communicate changes to necessary stakeholders, reducing a process that used to take days to complete to just minutes.”
The solution is being developed using large language models (LLMs) to read document and image text, identify references in various formats and extract relevant information much faster than a human. Designed and built within Microsoft Azure, the solution integrates pre-trained LLMs and Azure AI Search, Microsoft’s AI-powered information retrieval platform, in a unique architecture. This setup allows Main Roads’ team members to input, read and respond in their everyday language. It also enables them to create new notification workflows that simplify the process of keeping information up to date and aligned.
“Consistency and reliability are so critical in this context and so it is exciting to see the innovative way in which Main Roads is exploring the use of AI to keep their essential documents in check,” says Sarah Carney, Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft Australia and New Zealand. “
From ideation to proof of concept and use case testing, the new intelligent document library’s productivity and risk mitigation benefits could reinvent how practitioners are able to access online catalogues and libraries. GHD Digital continues to work towards harnessing the full potential of AI and related technologies, further improving value across its people and processes.