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Case study · Transport · Synthetic data
An end to end analytics platform for the Scottish strategic road network, built to show the full job: messy data in, tested and modelled, and a clear answer out. Every step is open to inspect.
Project facts
The challenge
Road sensors produce a reading every hour, at every site. Some readings are missing, some are impossible, and some sites drift out of calibration. Report straight from that feed and the totals are wrong before anyone looks at them.
The questions that matter to decision makers are not in the raw data at all: which roads cost the most in delays, collisions, and carbon, and when is the next collision most likely. Answering them means cleaning, modelling, predicting, and costing, in that order, with every step checked.
That is the same problem most businesses have with their spreadsheets, at a larger scale.
What I built
Seeded, reproducible generation of hourly sensor readings, so every run gives the same result.
33 models take raw readings from bronze to business-ready marts.
120 automated tests and 12 rules, each with a clear disposition.
A star schema: 8 dimensions, 3 fact tables, and 5 aggregates.
Gradient boosting forecasts collision risk from advance conditions.
232 measures turn it all into a board level view of cost and risk.
What it shows
95.70%
Records passing every quality rule
96,652 of 100,000. The rest are quarantined, imputed, or flagged, never silently deleted.
63.7%
Collisions caught in the riskiest 5% of hours
From weather, demand, and disruption known in advance. An upper bound, because the data is synthetic.
£1,353.3m
Central annual cost estimate
Range of roughly £1.05bn to £1.65bn, using DfT TAG casualty values and DESNZ carbon values.
Stated limits
Good analysis says where it stops. These limits are published on the platform itself, and your project gets the same honesty.
What this means for your business
Quality rules with dispositions
Your spreadsheets get checked and fixed, and nothing disappears without a record.
A tested, layered data model
Your reports refresh reliably, and the numbers match across every dashboard.
Measures defined once
One agreed definition for revenue, margin, or turnaround time, used everywhere.
Honest limits, stated upfront
You know exactly what your data can and cannot tell you, before you rely on it.
Built on generated data, not client data. Road names, cities, and appraisal values are real and publicly sourced; every traffic measurement is synthetic. Not affiliated with Transport Scotland.
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