Working with LTA to engineer innovative transport solutions

17 Aug 2009

In a Memorandum of Collaboration (MOC) inked on 13 August, NUS will work with Land Transport Authority (LTA) to meet tomorrow's urban transportation needs, as well as to develop a people-centred land transport system.

LTA has pumped $50 million into the Land Transport Innovation Fund to catalyse collaborations and joint research with industry partners and academics institutions. Other partners in the MOC are Institute of Systems Sciences (NUS), Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Nanyang Technological University and Singapore Management University. They will offer advance technologies to realise initiatives outlined in the Land Transport Master Plan launched in March 2008.

In the area of sustainable urban mobility, the Faculty of Engineering has proposed a spectrum of initiatives for a research programme. These include sustainable transportation planning, traffic estimation and prediction, intelligent traffic control and future urban transportation. Congestion-aware routing and adaptive traffic signal control will be the initial efforts where real-time traffic data will be collected to help motorists avoid congested roads. Traffic signal control system will also be enhanced to enable continuous traffic flow with minimal interruptions.

The Faculty of Engineering and LTA have also developed the world's first Quantitative Risk Analysis (QRA) to conduct both probabilistic and deterministic risk assessments of road tunnels. The system is able to simulate and re-construct actual tunnel fires, recently attracted much interest internationally when it was demonstrated at the Second International Tunnel Safety Forum for Road and Railway in France. The Netherlands, Taiwan and Croatia have expressed interest to collaborate with the NUS-LTA team. Further R&D on the QRA model and software will be conducted for applications in the design and planning of Singapore's future road tunnels.

Engineering Dean Prof Chan Eng Soon said: "In collaboration with LTA, NUS aims to take a major role in transforming Singapore's urban transportation system and environment for the future. Multi-disciplinary research based at the Faculty of Engineering will pave the way towards the development and implementation of an intelligent transportation system."

In his address at the signing ceremony, Prof Chan said that the NUS campus will be an excellent test bed for some of the ideas, especially when the MRT Circle Line is completed in the vicinity.