Data engineering
Portable engineers the data infrastructure behind live operations: real-time pipelines, platforms, and the models and dashboards built on top of them. Built to be run and extended by the teams who own them.
What we do
- Real-time data pipelines and streaming
- Data platform and warehouse engineering
- Sensor and telematics data integration
- Legacy data system modernisation
- Predictive models in production
- Analytics platforms and dashboards
- Data mesh architecture
Data engineering that keeps cities moving. Melbourne's tram network is the largest in the world, and none of it stops for a deployment.
250 km of double track, 1,750 stops, around 490 trams, more than 5,000 services a day. Close to three quarters of it runs in traffic, sharing road space with cars, buses and cyclists. Portable has engineered the data behind it since 2013. The Smarter Trams Program instrumented 399 trams with real-time and dead-reckoning GPS, holding a tram's position through the tunnels and urban canyons where satellite signal drops, and 240 with automatic passenger counting. We built the backend that moves telemetry off moving vehicles and the pipeline feeding it into an analytics platform, load-tested across the fleet, with security testing, DevOps and deployment pipeline management to match.
Data that drives 200 million trips a year. The infrastructure we built makes sure each journey is navigable.
Knowing how crowded the next tram is changes what someone with a pram, a wheelchair or a walking frame decides to do. Knowing where it actually is, rather than where the timetable says, changes how long a person waits on a street at night. That information reaches passengers because the data underneath it is accurate enough to publish. Operations Control watches every tram on the network in real time, planners find where it congests, and the Department of Transport and Planning draws on the same feed to ease bottlenecks across the road network.
Data analytics that tell a story and insights that build a path. A report tells you what happened once whereas a system tells you every time.
Yarra Trams reports daily on cancellations and delays to the Victorian Government. Portable built a tool that automates the analysis behind it, working through more than 2,000 trips a month and finding the ones manual review missed. The Power BI analytics platform we built with Yarra Trams and Dear Watson runs the same way: not a set of findings handed over, but a capability the team operates itself. That's the standard across our data work, whether we're engineering the platform or, as with Bushfire Recovery Victoria and Victoria's water monitoring system, designing how people use it.
