University of Engineering & Technology Taxila is one of the foremost technological Universities in Pakistan.

The University campus is located on the outskirts of Taxila and 35 km from the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi.

Taxila is an ancient city and World Heritage site, the ruins of which can still be visited. Its prosperity in ancient times resulted from its position at the junction of three great trade routes, described by the Greek writer Megasthenes as the “Royal Highway.

Taxila, besides being a provincial seat, was also a centre of learning. There was a University in Taxila that flourished from 600 BC to 500 AD. At one stage, it had 10,500 students including those from Babylon, Greece, Syria, and China. Experienced masters taught a wide range of subjects including: languages, grammar, philosophy, medicine, surgery and engineering.

The Project & UET Taxila Today
The current University College of Engineering Taxila was established in 1975. It has teaching and research facilities for all engineering and science subjects.

Dr. Awais Yasin of the Department of Mechanical Engineering approached FORUM8 to see if we could solve his problem. They wanted to build a state of the art Driving Simulator system based on a 6-DOF Stewart Motion Platform and hence required the very best and most comprehensive real-time interactive 3D software with which to work.

As Dr Yasin said, “Before starting our project, we did a detailed survey of the drive simulator market and visited a large number of universities and private companies in China.

"The places we visited include: Tsinghua University, Beijing; Tongji University, Shanghai; Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan; dSPACE, Shanghai; Beijing Mejicode Science & Technology Co. Ltd; Jilin University, Changchun; Nanjing Doron Technology Co. Ltd.

"All these universities and private companies were using different software tools of different origins, but one thing was common in that they were all using different software for different modules of their driving simulator. We did not want to replicate this and hence continued looking.

"In the light of our survey, we studied different options for our project involving the use of Carsim / Trucksim, Labview, SimCreator, Multigen Creator, dSPACE Hardware & Software, open source Graphics Libraries and Game Engines... Mersive, Matlab/ Simulink and many more...

"Our final selection of UC-Win/Road was based on the fact that no other software had the overall comprehensive functionality (‘All in One’) as UC-Win/Road, with both ease of use and cost effectiveness.

"The use of the FORUM 8 software in future will primarily depend on the success of our on-going driving simulator project. The immediate target may be our transportation department for traffic / drivers' safety study.

"It is early days but we are confident that we have chosen wisely and look forward to working with FORUM 8 for many years to come."