Arup, one of the world's leading engineering consultancies, used TraceCloud to manage Phase 1 requirements for the Canberra Metro light rail project — a $675 million, 12-kilometre route connecting Gungahlin to Canberra's city centre. The project, which opened in April 2019, involved multi-disciplinary coordination across signaling, civil engineering, rolling stock, power systems, and station design.
The Project
Canberra Metro Stage 1 is a nationally significant infrastructure program — the first light rail service for Australia's capital city. Arup was appointed as Technical Advisor for Stage 1, leading a consortium of specialists through the design phase of a complex Public-Private Partnership (PPP) delivery model.
The project scope included a 12km double-track route, 13 stops (later expanded to 14 with the addition of Sandford Street), a depot facility, 14 CAF-built Urbos 3 light rail vehicles, full electrification and signaling systems, and integration with Canberra's existing bus network at three major interchanges.
The engineering challenge was substantial: coordinating requirements across civil infrastructure (track, earthworks, utilities), station architecture and urban design, electrification and power systems, signaling and communications, rolling stock interface, and passenger information systems — all while managing interfaces with existing road networks and utilities along Northbourne Avenue, one of Canberra's busiest corridors.
The Challenge
Before TraceCloud, the project team managed requirements through a combination of Excel spreadsheets and document-based processes. As Arup scaled its technical advisory role across multiple engineering disciplines, the limitations became apparent:
- Cross-discipline traceability gaps. Requirements from different engineering disciplines lived in separate files. Tracing a stakeholder need through system requirements, into sub-system specifications, and down to verification activities required manual cross-referencing across multiple documents.
- Interface management complexity. A light rail project has extensive interfaces between civil, electrical, signaling, and rolling stock systems. Managing interface requirements in spreadsheets made it difficult to identify conflicts or gaps between disciplines.
- Review and approval bottlenecks. With multiple stakeholder organizations — Arup, Capital Metro Agency, PPP consortium, and subcontractors — review cycles using emailed spreadsheets created version conflicts and delayed approvals.
The Solution
TraceCloud provided a single platform where Arup's multi-disciplinary team could capture, structure, trace, and approve requirements — with full change history and baseline control at every project milestone.
The project was configured with requirement types matching the program's V-model: stakeholder needs, system-level requirements, sub-system specifications (organized by discipline), interface requirements, and verification/validation activities. Traceability links connected the full chain from top-level transport outcomes through to individual test cases.
Two-way Excel sync was particularly valuable — enabling Arup to share structured requirement data with stakeholders who worked primarily in spreadsheet format, while maintaining the single source of truth in TraceCloud.
The Results
Multi-discipline traceability on a $675M program
Full traceability from stakeholder needs through system requirements, sub-system specifications, and verification activities — across civil, electrical, signaling, rolling stock, and station design disciplines.
Successfully delivered — $32M under budget
Canberra Metro Stage 1 opened in April 2019 with a final construction cost of $675M — $32 million under the original budget. Structured requirements management contributed to reduced rework and clearer design decisions across the program.
Stakeholder collaboration across a PPP consortium
Requirements shared seamlessly between Arup, the Capital Metro Agency, and PPP consortium partners — with two-way Excel sync maintaining accessibility for stakeholders working in spreadsheet format.
Key Takeaway
When one of the world's most respected engineering consultancies chooses TraceCloud for a nationally significant infrastructure program, it demonstrates that the platform delivers at the enterprise scale and regulatory rigor that safety-critical rail projects demand — while remaining practical enough to deploy without months of implementation overhead.
The Canberra Metro program now serves over 90,000 passenger boardings per week — significantly higher than original forecasts — and Stage 2 is currently under construction to extend the network further south.