The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) in Chennai on the south-eastern tip of the Indian subcontinent has established a new Ventre of Excellence "Connected Intelligent Urban Transport" (CIUT). In the Centre - which is comparable to the German clusters of excellence - cutting-edge research is to be conducted in the field of networked and intelligent transport in urban areas. These are great news for the TU Dresden and especially for the "Friedrich List" Faculty of Transport and Traffic Sciences as well. The Dresden Chair of Econometrics and Statistics, esp. in the Transport Sector, and the Department of Civil Engineering of IIT Madras, where CIUT is located, have been cooperating closely for several years in the field of personnel (Humboldt and Marie Curie fellows) and scientific projects.

"The new centre of excellence enables us to take the existing cooperation between IIT Madras and TU Dresden to a whole new level. There are already concrete plans for this," says Prof. Ostap Okhrin, Head of the TUD Chair of Econometrics and Statistics, especially in the Transport Sector. He congratulates his Indian colleagues Dr. Karthik K. Srinivasan and Dr. Bhargava Rama Chilukuri from the Department of Civil Engineering on their success.

Broad research on networked and intelligent transport

Research on connected and intelligent transport is very broadly based in the new Centre of Excellence. The scientists will integrate the impacts of various compontents such as driver, vehicle, pavementce and surrounding traffic. As a result, models will be developed and evaluated in the areas of mobility, health and safety, and asset management and sustainability to optimise performance at the user and system level.

Towards these goals the IIT Madras and the Dresden Faculty of Transport Sciences "Friedrich List" will focus on advancing existing relationships. The project team around Prof. Ostap Okhrin, his colleague Dr. Martin Treiber and their students will be involved in the fields of data science, statistics, transportation science and physics "in order to better understand the complexities of heterogeneous traffic in the era of emerging technologies together with the Indian colleagues", says Okhrin. The cooperation will also include student and faculty visits, collaborative workshops, conducting short-term courses and proposal writing. "The success of the Indian colleagues also brings many new impulses, approaches and international exchange for our work at the professorship and in the faculty," says Ostap Okhrin.

The Center of Excellence “Connected Intelligent Urban Transport” (CIUT) at the IIT Madras / India is funded by the Indian government. It is part of the Government of India's Institutes of Eminence programme. In the funding programme, which has been running since 2017, 20 Institutes are supported academically and financially.