Postgraduate Award

Postgraduate Award

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

Congestion poses a significant challenge in numerous cities worldwide, leading to reduced speeds, longer travel times, and environmental concerns. In Australia, the impact is particularly pronounced, with projections indicating a staggering $38.8 billion congestion cost to the national economy by 2031 without intervention. While traditional infrastructure expansion is financially impractical, there is growing interest in implementing innovative traffic monitoring and management techniques. However, research highlights the limitations of solely focusing on building more roads, emphasizing the importance of demand management strategies. These strategies aim to either reduce demand by encouraging alternative modes of transport or redistribute demand over space and time. While spatial redistribution has received attention, there's a notable gap in addressing temporal redistribution strategies, despite their potential efficacy. Additionally, reliable demand estimation remains a critical challenge for developing effective traffic models and management strategies. Current methodologies face scalability and robustness issues, underscoring the need for further research in this area.


Here are two papers by Sakitha:

SAKITHA KUMARAGE - Winner 2023!
SAKITHA KUMARAGE - Winner 2023!
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