Development of transport infrastructure has significant challenges including acquisition lag, phased evolution, multiple disparate stakeholders and environment‐specific issues. The Asset Standards Authority (ASA) at TfNSW is introducing MBSE to address these challenges. Instrumental to the introduction is the development of a framework that structures the available data and provides guidance and traceability between the data sets. This framework combines the enterprise‐level drivers with the lower level drivers such as standards to outline a generic conceptual design for a transport system. This conceptual design is then used to guide future system development. The outcome is future project information based on greater, enduring understanding of the transport system.

Architecture tools have become axiomatic for project success however these tools are designed for tailoring to better meet user's needs. Transport for New South Wales (TfNSW), under the guidance of its Asset Standards Authority, is currently building an architecture framework model to help stakeholders understand and guide transport infrastructure projects in the future so that the delivered systems are more successful. To augment the work of developing the framework, the off‐the‐shelf tools have been tailored with a series of routines designed to standardize diagrams and structure, validate the model, detect anomalies and distribute data.

The vision of Transport for NSW (TfNSW) is documented in publicly available strategies and plans. To achieve this vision, the Asset Standards Authority (ASA), within TfNSW, has led the development of a Transport Network Architecture (TNA) model, a model that integrates the multiple strategic documents into a structured, visual, relational format that can be used consistently across the cluster. This model captures information from the strategies to form the enterprise perspective and traces this information to a concept operational perspective. The TNA is therefore a conceptual model that represents the structure and behaviour of the transport system. The aim of the TNA is to provide a basis for consistent asset planning and procurement for complex transport project. The different perspectives and views in the TNA allow a particular user to define and bridge the link between the business needs and requirements (i.e. problem domain) and the system needs (i.e. solution domain). Through effective stakeholder management, the framework has therefore captured the interest of transport planners and project delivery teams to assist them in various engineering related activities in delivering highly complex transport projects.

The increased complexity of modern infrastructure projects together with the desire of governments to provide improved services to their citizens gives rise to the need for much better engineering governance capability and the ability to model system and user behaviour to ensure the desired increased level of service. Modelling all aspects of planned systems through the use of standardised architecture framework models that can be developed to provide the necessary insight across all aspects and levels of concern for the system(s) is an excellent approach for achieving this. This paper describes the initial phase of development of such a toolset for the Asset Standards Authority (ASA) of Transport for New South Wales (TfNSW) that will be used to ensure coordinated development activities between all divisions in the department, as well as with Planning NSW and the private sector providers for system design, implementation, maintenance and operation. The initial development described here particularly focuses on existing, current and future heavy rail projects, but continuing work is under way to extend and generalise the model so that it applies to all rail transport modes (rapid transit metro and light rail) and eventually to include all other TfNSW transport modes -buses, walkways, ferries, cycle ways, and roads. Furthermore, this paper details how the use of a metamodel for the architecture framework provides the rigour and abstraction necessary to allow this generalisation within the same model structure.