Professor Chan Wirasinghe

Dr. Wirasinghe has 40 years of experience in transportation engineering and planning. His current research is in the areas of public transportation, air transportation, mitigating the effects of large natural disasters, transportation in developing countries, and engineering education. His work on urban public transport systems has led to basic insights regarding metro, LRT and bus route planning & design. His unique approach to metro planning is outlined in a seminal paper with Vandebona ( "Planning of Subway Transit Systems", Transportation and Traffic Theory, Pergammon, 1999, pp. 759–777).

He with his students has analyzed modal transition in a transit corridor, capacity and speed distribution of modes, LRT route and station location; stop, time-point, and garage location for bus systems; dispatching policies/time-tables, schedules, fleet sizing and reliability of service for the general "many to many" demand case. He is currently running a major research program PUTRUM for Calgary Transit in collaboration with Drs. Lina Kattan, J.D. Hunt, and Richard Tay. In the area of airport planning his pioneering work is widely cited with respect to the impact of New Large Aircraft (NLA) on airports, terminal configurations, passenger orientation, aircraft gate estimation, large airports with PRT systems and lounge sizing. The most recent work has been with Dr. Agan Nanayakkara on airport airside configurations. Case studies have been done at Calgary, LaGuardia, Vancouver, Atlanta, NW terminal-– Detroit, Singapore and new Hong Kong airports. Dr. Alex de Barros is the main collaborator in this area.

Transportation planning research has been undertaken in Canada, Sri Lanka and Nepal. He formed the International Institute for Infrastructure Renewal and Reconstruction (IIIRR) which has membership from Canada, Cuba, Germany, Sri Lanka and USA. The IIIRR facilitates research on the mitigation of the effects of large natural disasters. He has completed a research project with Dr. Janaka Ruwanpura and Dr. Sanjeewa Wickramaratne on mitigation of tsunami impact in the Indian Ocean. Along with Dr. Ruwanpura, he is working now on a tornado mitigation study for Calgary, Canada.

Dr. Wirasinghe continues to have an interest in engineering education, the interaction between universities and society at large, and educating for leadership.

See https://schulich.ucalgary.ca/contacts/s-chan-wirasinghe for more detail