The Cubic Corporation has announced that its Cubic Transportation Systems (CTS) business division has signed an agreement to participate in a research and development (R&D) project designed to improve traffic flow in Melbourne and other Australian cities through improved situational awareness for network operators.
CTS is an integrator of payment and information technology and services to create intelligent travel solutions for transportation authorities and operators. The agreement with the iMOVE Cooperative Research Center (CRC) in Melbourne partners Cubic with the University of Melbourne, Public Transport Victoria, VicRoads, and the Transport Accident Commission, to conduct a two-year multi-phase project, the ‘Implementation of a Multimodal Situational Awareness and Operations Regime Evaluation Platform’.
Operating under the Australian Department of Industry, Innovation and Science’s Cooperative Research Centers program, the iMOVE CRC is a consortium of 44 industry, government and research partners engaged in a 10-year effort to improve the country’s transportation systems through collaborative R&D projects. Funding for this latest project and other R&D initiatives was provided by the Australian government through a A$55m (US$41m) grant in 2017.
The new project will consider the safety implications and interaction between all modes of transportation, including walking, cycling, car, freight, bus and tram, to identify blockages in the seamless management of integrated multimodal transportation systems and networks. The data collection infrastructure behind the project is the Australian Integrated Multimodal EcoSystem (AIMES) at the University of Melbourne, in which Cubic’s Transport Management Platform is the main integration hub.
AIMES is a transportation test bed area in Melbourne that uses around 1,000 sensors of different types to collect data on vehicle and pedestrian movement, and public transport use. The data will eventually offer a real-time, system-wide view of what is happening across the area’s multimodal transport network, and it will in time allow predictive analyses, allowing the test bed to detect the likelihood of problems and diminish their impact before they occur.
“Cubic and our partners are excited to be part of this iMOVE project that will deliver another significant step in multimodal transport management, in which Australia is leading the way,” said Tom Walker, senior vice president and managing director for the Asia-Pacific region at CTS. “Through the collection and use of detailed operational data and the implementation of advanced algorithms, we expect the project will demonstrate that improved journey reliability can be delivered within our cities.”
