For outstanding, high-quality research and future contribution to our profession.
Each year, the SIDRA SOLUTIONS Postgraduate Award is given to the most outstanding postgraduate student from a tertiary institution in Australia or New Zealand, based on the quality of his or her research and potential to make a significant contribution to the traffic and transport engineering profession.
ITE-ANZ and SIDRA SOLUTIONS are proud partners in this award.
SAKITHA KUMARAGE - Winner 2023!
Congratulations to Sakitha Kumarage of the School of Civil Engineering, University of Queensland for winning the 2023 SIDRA SOLUTIONS Postgraduate Award for his thesis titled ‘Demand Management and Estimation in Large-scale Traffic Networks’.
Summary of Research
Sakitha's PhD research explored demand management and demand estimation strategies applicable in large-scale traffic networks. The research topic is of interest as congestion costs are increasing due to urban sprawl and traffic gridlock. The research involved three key modelling elements. The first element proposed a demand management strategy that redistributes demand over time by modifying travellers’ departure times within a limited time window. The second element developed demand estimation strategies using the hierarchical dynamics of macroscopic and mesoscopic traffic models. These revealed a robust origin-destination flow estimation method scalable to large-scale traffic networks. The third element was a combined estimation and control framework developed to facilitate real-time demand management and traffic control methods applicable for large-scale traffic networks. This depended only on limited real-time traffic counts from loop detectors. The findings of this research demonstrate the importance of incorporating macroscopic traffic models to improve accuracy and reliability when designing demand management and demand estimation strategies for large-scale networks.
Here are two papers by Sakitha:
