Today, Friday 11th November, Aimsun celebrates 25 years in business.
The Barcelona-based company has grown from a university research spinoff to an international leader in mobility planning and transport management technology.
The term ‘digital twin’ is now well known and Aimsun is one of the companies that helped to popularize the concept of using modeling to test transportation schemes prior to implementation; the team was also at the vanguard of moving the concept of virtual testing to real-time, which now forms a large part of its business.
“The secret of Aimsun’s success is probably that it keeps innovating like a startup,” said CEO, Alex Torday (pictured right). “We may be a quarter of a century old, but we haven’t lost that original agility. Mobility tech is having a ‘moment’ right now – it’s a highly dynamic industry that’s attracting some of the best minds out there, and I’m proud that Aimsun has proved it can match that level of energy and technical expertise.”
Right from its inception, Aimsun has been at the forefront of transport technology. The company has its origins in Barcelona in the late 1980s, just as the city was poised to host the 1992 Olympic Games. A group of Catalan researchers at the Polytechnic University Catalonia (known locally as the UPC) created microsimulation software to help reduce congestion and create a more fluid, navigable city during the Games. Seeing a clear demand for such a product, the team formally incorporated a few years later, in 1997.
Aimsun was initially an acronym that stood for “Advanced Interactive Microscopic Simulator for Urban and Non-Urban Networks.” But it has long since outgrown its origins, extending far beyond microscopic simulation to become the comprehensive framework of multi-tier solutions and services that we know today. The Aimsun team includes top-class transport modelers, data scientists and engineers to deliver its mobility solutions in over 100 countries worldwide.
“We’re not only celebrating our 25th birthday, but also our highest ever order intake in company history in the fiscal year that has just ended,” said CFO Mathias Merta (pictured left). “The demand for effective, efficient and greener mobility solutions has never been higher.”
