Edinburgh Napier University

  Transport data managers within government and non-government agencies face increasing demands on resources for data management systems to process extremely large data sets collected by automated systems and for surveys to collect new types of data. These are seldom accompanied by a corresponding rise in departmental budgets and thus decisions about the frequency of major surveys to update existing data become important. This paper reports the results of study which set out to produce a generic framework for effective and efficient survey update, underpinned by theory and practice from the literature. However the literature directly addressing this subject was found to be extremely thin. Lack of attention to the question was confirmed via a survey of international experts who agreed that in practice update was usually triggered by external circumstances. The study thus drew on related literature and reported practice to develop some principles for establishing update frequencies and build a process model. This decision framework, illustrated by examples is presented here.