
Dr. Saberi is an Associate Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. Prior to joining UNSW, he was an academic at Monash University, Melbourne from 2014 to 2018. He holds a PhD degree in Transportation Systems Analysis and Planning from Northwestern University, USA. He also has a Master's degree in Transportation Engineering from Portland State University, USA and a Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, IRAN. He is leading the CityX research lab as part of the Research Centre for Integrated Transport Innovation (rCITI) which focuses on scientific understanding of cities through modelling, simulation, data analytics, and visualisation. His research interests and experience cover a range of transportation engineering areas including traffic flow theory & characteristics, large-scale transportation network modelling, complex networks, pedestrian crowd dynamics and simulation, and urban data analytics & visualisation.
Dr Saberi is also a co-founder of footpath.ai, a UNSW spinout, that scales and automates mapping of the walking infrastructure with GeoAI and computer vision.
Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant DP220102382 (2022-2025) Rethinking walking infrastructure: AI-assisted footpath network modelling
Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant DP210102089 (2021-2024) on sustainable mobility: city-wide exposure modelling to advance bicycling
Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Grant LP190100650 (2020-2023) with Adiona on stable on-demand optimization for workforce and fleet logistics management.
My main research activities are mostly in the field of traffic flow theory and transport network modelling. I am a member of the Committee on Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics and Committee on Network Modelling of the Transportation Research Board of the U.S. National Academies. During the past several years, I have extensively worked on understanding dynamics and modelling of large-scale transport networks in the contexts of Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD) or Network Fundamental Diagram (NFD), Simulation-based Dynamic Traffic Assignment (DTA), and pedestrian networks. Following is a list of some of the ongoing research projects in my group:
During the past ten years, I have engaged with a number of industry and government organisations including
My Research Supervision
Current PhD students:
Former PhD students:
My Teaching
CVEN9422 Traffic Management and Control
Traffic engineering professionals are tasked with the responsibility of ensuring the safe and efficient movement of people and goods through the provision and maintenance of transportation systems. The effectiveness of the transport system defines the economic development and quality of life for the entire community. This course offers students an advanced understanding of the field of traffic management and control, with a focus on traffic flow theory and characteristics of both motorised and non-motorised traffic. The course covers topics including fundamentals of traffic flow theory and analysis, queuing theory, shockwave theory and analysis, microscopic simulation, design and operations of unsignalised and signalised intersections, and network traffic flow.
CVEN4402 Transport Systems - Part 1: Network Analysis
This subject covers strategic planning aspects related to transport systems, including transport network-based analysis, modelling and optimisation techniques. Network representation of transport systems and traffic route choice modelling including user equilibrium and system optimal are the two main broad topics that will be discussed in this subject. Knowledge about different types of transport network solutions and when and where to apply them are important for transport professionals. The subject material focuses on network theory in some depth, and a reasonable mathematical competency, as well as the ability to perform computational work, will be required to follow this subject. Computer literacy will be helpful but is not essential.