WGE’s Elliot Alfirevich has been named by Engineers Australia as one of the nation’s most innovative engineers for his highly integrated technology solution at the Perth Busport. The list of innovative engineers was announced in the latest edition of Engineers Australia’s flagship publication, create magazine.
Elliot’s bespoke solution maintains a new level of passenger comfort and safety for Perth commuters and travellers by ensuring that the doors to the busway are only open for the minimum required time. This was achieved by utilising a laser scanner to determine the dimensions of the bus as it arrives in front of the public lounge area and opens the lounge doors only once the bus doors are opened by the driver.
Other stations have the same underground configuration with standard motion sensors on each door between the passenger lounge and the busway. However, this causes doors to activate unnecessarily as buses and passengers move through the station, impacting passenger comfort and safety. Elliot’s innovation was developed to solve this problem.
Elliot said the Busport project brought some interesting challenges that required significant testing in the real environment.
“This laser technology is normally used in the mining sector for safety application, but was easily adapted to work at the Busport. We spent two days driving all the different makes and models of Transperth’s bus fleet around the depot to test and refine the software and tolerances,” he said.
“It was a very memorable project and it’s great to be recognised by Engineers Australia.”
More than 200 engineers were nominated for inclusion in the list which was judged by a panel of Australia’s top engineering and science experts.
Engineers Australia National President John McIntosh congratulated all the winners.
“Australian engineers are respected worldwide both for our ingenuity and persistence in making our solutions work,” he said. “We are the home, after all, of world famous inventions such as WiFi and the black box flight recorder.”
