Australian Integrated Multimodal Ecosystem, the University of Melbourne

If you’re travelling around the city of Melbourne, whether on foot, bicycle, tram or car, you could be part of an experimental ‘ecosystem’ connecting road users and testing the smart-transport solutions of tomorrow.

Majid Sarvi is the Chair of Transport Engineering and Professor of Transport for Smart Cities at the University of Melbourne. It’s his vision of cooperation in transport that has inspired AIMES – the Australian Integrated Multimodal EcoSystem.

AIMES is the world’s first and largest ecosystem for testing emerging connected transport technologies at large scale, in complex urban environments – right here on the streets of Melbourne.

This living laboratory incorporates 6 square kilometres of Melbourne, on the fringe of the CBD. Within the test area, sensors connect and monitor all parts of the transport environment; not just cars, trucks, trams and buses, but pedestrians, cyclists and the infrastructure itself, from footpaths to traffic lights.

Majid calls it ‘intelligent connectivity’. He sees it as the natural evolution of our transport system towards an intelligent future. Majid has over 23 years’ experience in the areas of traffic and transport engineering. His work is multidisciplinary, combining the modelling of crowd dynamics and movement, road safety, network design and sophisticated mathematical modelling to bring to life a cooperative transport system.

It’s here, in this ecosystem, academic researchers, industry and government are testing connected transport technology to explore better outcomes, solving issues of safety and congestion to create a safer, cleaner and smarter transport future.

Create your own interpretation of this artwork with our colouring-in sheet(PDF, 1.2 MB).

Illustrated by Alice Lindstrom.