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| INFORMATION | • Collaboration News Vol.5 |
• SIAS Limited  http://www.paramics.co.uk |
Towards Collaboration with Paramics Microsimulation for Transport Planning in the UK
FORUM8 and SIAS Limited (SIAS) agreed on business alliance and signed an agreement at the Tokyo Head Office of FORUM8 in November 17, 2009.
Based in Edinburgh in the UK, SIAS has been providing expertise and technologies concerning a wide range of issues related to transport planning for more than 30 years. Its activities include consultancy to analyze and design urban plans as well as highway network. It also develops, markets and supports "S-Paramics Microsimulation", the software for simulating and visualizing road traffic.
Mr. Pete Sykes, Director of Development, SIAS visited Japan to sign the collaboration agreement and after that to give a special lecture at the "3rd International VR Symposium" in November 19 in "FORUM8 Design Festival 2009 窶・3days" (Nov. 18-20). We interviewed him about the latest trend of S-Paramics Microsimulation as well as his idea about collaboration with us.
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 signing ceremony, November 2009 |
Mr. Pete Sykes |
Advancement of Transport planning and Expansion of S-Paramics
SIAS was set up in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland in 1974, as a branch office to perform transport-planning consultancy. In 1988, the current organization was formed. Since then, SIAS opened offices in Perth and Glasgow in Scotland, and London and Birmingham in England, currently having 65 staff members in the UK.
As its history shows, the Company's core activity is transport planning. Its main clients are central and local governments, their agencies, and private sector developers. It was the first company in the UK to adopt microsimulation, developing its own software for the market
SIAS's Paramics Microsimulation division has developed a widely applicable traffic flow modeling system in response to the demand of transport planning markets in the world over. S-Paramics is the latest version of the software for the analysis and design of such urban and highway networks.
S-Paramics offers wide area modeling with high accuracy, such as tiered dynamic route choice for robust routing in large networks, with links to ITS and UTC systems. S-Paramics can also model transit operations with user defined scheduling and bus stop loading.
S-Paramics is highly respected by traffic planners and modelers throughout the world as the most versatile and comprehensive road traffic flow analysis system. This is largely due to SIAS's long experience in the application of S-Paramics on many varied projects..
Mr. Pete Sykes is in charge of developing S-Paramics Microsimulation and selling the software worldwide. He described several applications of S-Paramics including mitigation measure of congestion on orbital M25 motorway in London, the express bus transit plan in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, the control system for traffic congestion in the town of Esher in Surrey during Hampton Court Flower Show, and examining the effect on transport of large developments in the Plymouth using one of the largest microsimulation models in the world.
Background of the Partnership and Expectation of It
Although S-Paramics Microsimulation is capable of graphical presentation such as representing landscape and buildings, its priority is firmly based in analyzing, designing, examining, and evaluating transport and urban plans. Its output is a comparison of journey times, levels of congestion, fuel consumption and carbon emissions. These outputs form part of a decision support system for local and national roads authorities However, in recent years, Mr. Sykes says that there is an increase in the number of cases for which presentations of higher level are required and collaboration with a company with VR production Expertise would be the ideal way to address this.
SIAS first saw FORUM8's 3D real-time VR software "UC-win/Road" several years ago for the first time. They made no substantial progress at that time, but in early summer 2009, Mr. Sykes had a chance to talk with Dr Brendan Hafferty from FORUM8 at the annual Transport Modelling Forum held at Chelsea Football Club. They decided that linking traffic simulation technology of SIAS and visualization and presentation technologies of FORUM8 would bring about great advantages to each other.
In addition, having been expanding its market centering on Europe, America and Oceania, SIAS has an aim of strengthening its activities in the Asian market including Japan and China. SIAS also expects a good effect from the partnership with FORUM8 in this aspect.
SIAS hopes to jointly expand the market while understanding each other's software better through training staff from both companies and so on.
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| Front view of the corporate HQ of SIAS |
SIAS website・・A target="_blank" href="http://www.paramics.co.uk">www.paramics.co.uk・・/TD> |
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| Application to traffic micro simulation (PPT slides) |
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| UC-win/Road Micro Simulation Player |
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