One on One – Ian Christensen

AMT: What is iMOVE Australia? How long have you been in operation and what are the organisation’s objectives?

Ian Christensen: iMOVE Australia is Australia’s national centre for R&D in transport and mobility. We run the iMOVE Cooperative Research Centre (iMOVECRC), which is funded through the Federal Government’s CRC program. It was set up in 2017 to tackle major challenges and harness opportunities in areas such as congestion, supply chain optimisation, journey planning, and a whole range of diverse transport-related tasks, all of which could benefit from the evolving tech. The CRC Program approach is an interesting way of doing this; it has a strong track record of delivery over many years by strenghthening connections between research and business and harnessing national research capability to business challenges.

As iMOVE operates nationally we are in the fortunate position of working with many different partners in government, industry and academia. Most of Australia’s state government transport departments are conducting some form of research through the centre, as is the Federal Department of Infrastructure.

AMT: Can you give some examples of the projects you’re working on?

IC: With over 60 projects in the project portfolio, we cover a very broad range of areas. I’ll give you a few illustrative examples. We conducted a study for the Department of Infrastructure looking at all the sources of freight data in the nation, and the need for freight data that exists in both the transport sector and industry more broadly. We combined the two to determine what Australia should do next to improve visibility over freight information for the transport and adjacent sectors. The Department of Infrastructure subsequently used this report to secure funding from Treasury to establish a freight data hub for the nation.

In a different space, but with a common theme of how we use data to optimise transport, is our exploration of Mobility as a Service (MaaS).The big idea of MaaS is to bundle different transport or mobility options together providing a very user-friendly interface for booking and paying for transport in an integrated manner. A project we are doing in Sydney with IAG and the University of Sydney is looking at how customers would pay some sort of monthly subscription which gives them access to a range of mobility services suited to them. This research will help us understand the appetite for MaaS offerings and how we can best respond to diverse community needs. The approach to passenger transport is now becoming increasingly person-centric. Technology now presents an opportunity to determine options based on very specific criteria such as whether you want the cheapest option, or prefer to sit down, or you want wifi access for the duration of the journey because you want to work, and so on.

We’re also actively involved in the connected and automated vehicle space, looking to see how Australia could generate benefits, particularly safety benefits, from early adoption of vehicle connectivity and vehicle automation. The most high-profile of these activities is the connected vehicle trial taking place in Ipswich, Queensland. This ambitious trial will determine the impact of vehicle connectivity in a range of scenarios through capturing data on vehicles from the local community that have been retrofitted with the relevant technology.

AMT: Tell us how you got involved with iMOVE and your professional background before that.

IC: After doing chemistry and maths at uni, I spent 30 years or so in the manufacturing sector, largely in the process industries, making polymers, paper, sealant, masterbatch, and ultimately pigments, in a stint overseas in Switzerland. In all those manufacturing spaces, I was always heavily involved in product and process improvement, so when I came back from Switzerland, I sought to get work in the technology development space and ended up in the first of three CRCs that I’ve been involved in.

The first one was the Molecular Plant Breeding CRC, a little bit away from manufacturing, but nonetheless an area of quite dramatic development. Then the second was the Automotive CRC, which was focused heavily on improving vehicle manufacturing and improving supply chains to manufacturers, as well as looking at alternative energy sources for vehicles.

Finally, based on the automotive experience, we thought about how we could take what we had learned at AutoCRC and use it in the wider context of transport and mobility. So we set up iMOVE as a CRC to focus on further opportunities to improve the movement of people and goods. I see the common thread in all of this experience as the desire to keep pushing boundaries to make things better in our technologically advanced world. Transport of course touches all of us every day in some shape or form, so the opportunities are huge and it is an immensely satisfying area in which to work.

AMT: So you were with the AutoCRC during that period when the last three car manufacturers in Australia closed down?

IC: Yes. It was a sad day. The AutoCRC operated from 2005 to 2017, so that spanned the period when the support was withdrawn, when the decisions to leave were taken, and when Ford, Toyota and Holden actually wound themselves up.

AMT: Looking back on that time, it was obviously a traumatic period for Australian manufacturing, but it also prompted a lot of reflection on the future opportunities both in manufacturing and in mobility and transport.

IC: Yes. It was indeed traumatic, that’s absolutely the word for it. For me, I had been through a smaller version of that earlier, in late 1980s, early 1990s, when effectively the same thing happened to the chemical industry. Most process manufacturing left and went offshore at that time, and that too caused a lot of dislocation. But the wind-up of automotive had an even more dramatic impact on Australia’s manufacturing sector. And it really challenges us all to think what’s the role for manufacturing that suits the Australian context? What’s the path of the manufacturing industry and how can we configure our strengths into an economically viable industry?

I think the answer to that is agility. The thing that Australian industry has developed over many years is an ability to develop new stuff, to put it into production quickly, and to cope with rapid product changes within a production process. Whether that’s changing colours or changing grades or changing models, Australian industry is adept at facilitating change processes. I think that’s ultimately the characteristic that will distinguish Australian manufacturing in the global sector. We might never be the global-scale, long-run manufacturing hub you see in Europe and North America and China, but we can compete very effectively in the innovative, short-run agile space.

AMT: What are the big trends taking place in transport and mobility at the moment?

IC: It’s data. There’s a huge surge happening in the amount of data visibility being generated over the movement of people and the movement of goods. We now drive around in ‘computers on wheels’, and almost all of us walk around with a ‘computer’ in our pocket or bag. The huge amount of data being generated by our cars, trucks and smartphones creates enormous possibilities for improving how we get around.

Coming through as well is the ability and value in actually tracking goods, whether that’s tracking containers or tracking product. The technology now exists to do that in a cost-effective way.These tracking mechanisms create another mountain of data, which ultimately will enable manufacturers to get better visibility over their supply chains. This includes their inbound supply chains of components and raw materials, and their outbound supply chains of finished product on its way to destination. Because of that visibility, there is substantial opportunity in the transport sector to apply lessons that manufacturing learnt over decades, to reduce waste of time and effort.

In a way, it’s applying ‘Just in Time’ to the transport sector in the same way it has been applied in manufacturing for many years. As we improve the speed, the resilience, the predictability of supply chain behaviour, manufacturers will be able to get better efficiencies out of their operations.

AMT: This all sounds a lot like the ideas around Industry 4.0 in manufacturing processes.

IC: Yes, this is exactly the same, except it’s the movement of materials around the nation and the world. It’s taking Industry 4.0, but trying to run it outside the fence, rather than just inside the manufacturing system.That’s important because for Australian manufacturing to succeed, it has to engage with international supply chains. The reality is that the big markets for our products are all overseas. We have to find a way to stay closely engaged with upstream and downstream partners in other countries.

And if you’ve got to turn on the furnace or clean down the production line in anticipation of the next job, you need to have confidence that the truck is going to arrive when they say it will, not the next day, because you don’t want to turn the furnace on, say, 12 hours early. A lot of things can be done to make manufacturing more efficient if we can get better prediction and reliability out of our supply chains.

AMT: What about the movement of people, with public transport and private vehicles?

IC: There’s a lot going on, including a general trend towards treating transport networks as one whole system, rather than a number of networks operating side-by-side. We see this integrated approach in the nature of the projects we are are doing and also in the way that our state governments are structuring themselves to develop and deliver services. Balancing use of private vehicles with good public transport and other transport services enables us to tackle a big issue: congestion. We can improve the reliability of journey times, both for people and goods, if we look at the transport system as a whole.

Most people make journeys not because they want to take a journey, but because they want to get to a destination. They’re trying to get to school; they’re trying to get to work; they’re trying to get to a party. Every trip is purposeful. We want to help people execute on that purpose with less effort, less stress, less time. So, we seek to develop the ability to predict the traffic situation: in ten minutes time; in half an hour’s time; in two days’ time; at the time that you want to go. We hope to get to a situation when your diary or phone will tell you when to leave in order to get to the destination on time.

It will also tell you what transport combination is the best way to get there. If you’re trying to get to a concert in the city, it may not be the best thing to drive your car – it might be better to take public transport. Can Google or your diary tell you in advance which train or bus to catch? Or if you are going to go by car, could you book a parking spot in advance? These are all anticipations; we’re trying to facilitate prediction and anticipation so people can make their journeys more easily and with less time wasted waiting for something to happen.

When we travel we want to be some assurance in real time that our travel plan is working out. On my phone I can see the train coming, I can see the Uber coming, I can see the congestion building up on, say, Hoddle Street. That real-time visibility allows you to make better decisions. It also enables you to accommodate changing circumstances much more effectively. So if there is a crash on the freeway and you’re going to have to deviate, it would be helpful if your navigation system knew about the crash as soon as it happened, and immediately plotted an alternate path that would get you to your destination, rather than waiting to get into the traffic jam with no exit and then fretting about being held up for an unknown period of time while they clear the accident.

AMT: Is the COVID-19 pandemic having much impact on how quickly or slowly these changes are taking shape?

IC: COVID has been a dramatic experiment. It has forced people to change their behaviour at a rate and in ways that we would never have thought to be possible. And people’s movement behaviour is high amongst the behaviours that have been impacted by the COVID pandemic and the shutdowns.

Some of that is really beneficial. We’ve achieved in six months what we were hoping to achieve in six years, dealing with the peak travel demand that causes congestion. Forcing people to work from home largely eliminated the morning and evening peak hour rush.

So it absolutely raises the question: should we institutionalise work from home? Never mind whether people like it or they don’t like it, if some degree of working from home would actually mitigate peak congestion, maybe it’s something we, the community, should explore.

The performance of the freight sector has been a strong beneficiary of COVID as well, because for three or four months they had a more or less free run of the road network. It’s demonstrated the clear value to both the transport sector and the community when transport can be freed from the constraints of congestion.

Can we maintain that as we revert to ‘normal’ travel behaviour? It’s a difficult question. As people go back to work, particularly if they go back by car instead of by public transport, then the congestion issue is clearly reappear, potentially even worse than before. But I think the COVID has shown us that we know what we can do. It’s the question of how we might actually implement the solution that COVID has shown us exists.

And of course, last-mile deliveries have gone through the roof as well. If you’re in the last-mile delivery business, you’re having a bonanza. But are we doing last-mile delivery in an efficient way? I suspect there’s an awful lot of half-full trucks rushing around the suburbs, making all the same trips in a way that, from a whole-of-system point of view, is not particularly efficient.

I think out of COVID-19 there might emerge a more active marketplace for transport capacity. So if a truck is making a trip and it’s got space for a few more pallets or parcels, how does it make that capacity available to the sector? It has to be in a timely way, because the trip is going to happen at a particular time, but is there some way they can then pick up other deliveries that could be made on the same trip? If I’m heading to Dandenong and I aim to arrive there at 10.00am, and I’m starting in Werribee or Bayswater, what else can I pick up on the way, to make me a dollar and simultaneously solve somebody else’s transport problem?

AMT: What opportunities exist for Australian manufacturing firms to capitalise these changes?

IC: It goes back to that question of agility, or that question of quick responsiveness. I would encourage manufacturers to continue to look for additional opportunities, even if it involves a short run or a quick turnaround, and then use this emerging visibility over the transport universe to see how they can get their raw materials or their components into production in time, and similarly how they can construct the delivery process to get the goods to the customer in the timeframe that the customer wants. I would encourage them to use this growing visibility to win more short-turnaround jobs.

And that could apply to overseas work as well. Though with work for overseas short-turnaround might mean two or three weeks, as opposed to something like delivering pizzas, where short-term might mean five minutes. The question of what is short-term is very much dependent on the sort of manufacturing tasks you’re dealing with. But the point about increasing visibility in the transport sector means you can pull together the plan to actually make it happen and capture additional business at the margin in a way that wouldn’t have been possible five or 10 years ago.

AMT: Do you see this as an area where Australia can develop a real advantage internationally?

IC: I would say that, on the one hand, Australia has already got a reputation and a capability for being relatively agile. On the other hand, I would say it’s imperative that Australia improves its agility because we absolutely suffer the tyranny of distance, and nowhere more so than in manufacturing, where there’s a big distance to your suppliers and customers, domestically and overseas. That compels us to become good at getting stuff in and out quickly. Transport agility is an essential requirement for manufacturing agility, and manufacturing agility is something that manufacturing has to execute in order to be competitive in the global markets.

AMT: Finally, what’s the most satisfying aspect of your job?

IC: I love finding a better way to do things. And that usually means less frustration, less wasting of time, making things more predictable, more reliable. And I love seeing the opportunities amidst the chaos. COVID is really a pain, but it has thrown a lot of balls up in the air. I think the challenge for us is to see the opportunities that that creates, or to see the learnings that that gives us, that we can apply going forward and be better as a result.

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