Dr Hendrik Zurlinden is a civil engineer with a focus on traffic engineering in the Mobility Futures team delivering smart motorway, road safety and traffic management projects. Hendrik has extensive experience in advanced traffic flow theory including its practical application and in road network optimisation with a focus on avoiding congestion and increasing safety on urban motorways.

Hendrik has experience in strategic transport network planning and operational optimisation including Movement and Place, gained during more than 10 years he spent with VicRoads and, more recently, the Victorian Department of Transport (Vic DoT). Between 2021 and 2022, Hendrik spent 18 months in Germany at Autobahn GmbH where, as the Team Leader Road Safety, he developed a motorway safety strategy and a software for the identification and mitigation of accident hot spots to be applied to 13,000 km of federal motorways.

Hendrik has a PhD in Civil Engineering with a specialisation in traffic flow theory from Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany and has applied this knowledge in fine-tuning the Melbourne Managed Motorway system based on the likelihood of flow breakdown at different traffic levels. Hendrik also contributed large parts of the Vic DoT Managed Motorway Design Guide (MMDG); most prominently, he developed the Motorway Capacity Guide (MMDG, Volume 1, Part 3).