PDEng in Operations Management at Eindhoven University of Technology

The School of Industrial Engineering is one of the longest-established IE Schools in Europe, with a strong presence in the international research, design, and education community, especially in the field of Operations Management and Operations Research. OM and OR are at the core of the undergraduate IE program. The graduate programs (MSc, PDEng, and PhD) in Operations Management & Logistics attract top-level candidates from all over the world. PDEng candidates enroll in the two-year Industrial Engineering designers program and participate in industrial activities, among others with members of the European Supply Chain Forum.

The OPAC group of the School of Industrial Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology is looking for a PDEng candidate to perform a top level science based design project. The OPAC group conducts design projects in industry, with specific emphasis on
Planning and Control in Manufacturing, Services, and Supply Chains;
Distribution Logistics;
Maintenance and Reliability;
Finance and Accounting, oriented towards operational processes.

Design projects are result-oriented and require the development, testing and implementation of tools or techniques that improve the performance of an operational system in practice. All design projects are embedded in SAI, the 3TU Institute for Design, and in Beta, the KNAW-recognized research school for Operations Management & Logistics.

Tasks
The PDEng candidate is expected to follow 12 months of courses in which design capabilities are developed, and to perform a design project in the focus area Maintenance and Reliability, more specifically on Condition Based Maintenance, under the supervision of prof.dr.ir. G.J.J.A.N van Houtum and dr.ir. R.J.I. Basten.

Project Background
During the long life cycle of capital goods, such as radar systems, baggage handling systems, poultry processing lines, and professional printers, maintenance needs to be performed. Timely maintenance is important in order to keep the capital goods operational and the primary process of its user going. Maintenance can be performed upon failure, i.e., corrective maintenance, or it can be performed every so many weeks, i.e., time based maintenance. Increasingly, condition based maintenance is used, which means that maintenance is performed when a certain measured condition reaches a certain threshold. The measured condition can be vibrations or parts in oil samples, for example. Application of condition based maintenance complicates planning of maintenance for multi-component systems, and it requires high responsiveness from the service logistics, i.e., all processes that are required in order to get spare parts, service engineers, equipment, etc. at the right time at the right place. In this project, we aim to apply condition based maintenance models at a company, taking into account the service logistics processes that are required for that. This position is part of the so-called ProSeLoNext project, in which we collaborate with twelve parties in total (three other universities and nine companies).

Deadline Application: 30-04-2016

Further details:
PDEng in Operations Management at indhoven University of Technology