The Integrated Transport Centre (ITC) Abu Dhabi has chosen Aimsun and Siemens Mobility to develop its Hybrid Simulation Model. Covering the entire Abu Dhabi Emirate, the scope and scale of this multi-tier model are without precedent, covering 1,300km of motorway, 3,900km of major and secondary road and over 50,000km of directional road, carrying millions of daily trips over private and public transport.
The ITC Abu Dhabi is developing a ground-breaking Transport Modelling Framework Steam+. Adding to its traditional four-step modelling, the new framework also covers meso and micro models and near real-time simulation.
The ITC is linking big datasets including day-to-day anonymized mobile phone tracking, water/electricity consumption by household, live bus and taxi fleets, building and plot level municipal data, as well as a comprehensive population and employment dataset.
This is a hugely ambitious project and nothing of this scale has yet been undertaken by other transport authorities. The Steam+ Framework will place Abu Dhabi’s Transport Modelling program among the best in the world and pioneers to the next big thing in modelling.
A special feature is that the Abu Dhabi Hybrid model is multi-tiered, allowing assessment of schemes ranging from specific intersections, to large infrastructure studies, transit corridors, or policy tests, be they for a single central business district block or across the whole Emirate.
It complements perfectly the current regional strategic model (called Steam) and the Modelling Framework (Steam+) developed by ITC for more detailed, dynamic assessment of flow metering at junctions, traffic queuing, ITS and emerging technologies, bus priority schemes and LRT delays at junctions to mention but a few.
“The ITC is eagerly looking forward to the development and launch of the Hybrid Model in 2021,” says Abdullah Mohammed Maatouq Al Marzouqi, the director general, at the Abu Dhabi ITC. “The Hybrid Model will be an integral part of our analytics framework and a vital decision support tool for all transport planning endeavours in the Emirate.”
“Siemens Mobility has been a leader for seamless, sustainable, reliable and secure transport solutions for more than 160 years. We are very thankful to ITC for their trust to execute this project in Abu Dhabi,” says Pierre Schwing, the CEO of Siemens Mobility LLC (UAE). “Our project team is already actively engaged with ITC and is executing this state-of-the-art project which will propel mobility in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi to the next level.”
“We are proud to have come out the winners of a highly sophisticated selection process,” says Alex Gerodimos, Aimsun CEO. “We aim to delight the Abu Dhabi ITC team with the quality of our deliverables drawing on our team’s wealth of experience in developing large-scale models in North America, Australia and New Zealand, the UK and the rest of Europe.”
