PDEng program Smart Buildings & Cities in Replication potential for Smart Urban Lighting at Einhoven University of Technology

The Smart Buildings & Cities PDEng program wants to contribute to the transition towards smart, intelligent and sustainable cities where quality of life is high. This transition requires new solutions which can only be created through multiscale and transdisciplinary (design) approaches. This requires technical designers who are able to work in a multidisciplinary environment and know how to communicate with different disciplines and stakeholders. This PDEng program educates trainees to become those technical designers! Please note that this program is about technological design, i.e., the process of solving problems by means of a technological design, this in contrast to (PhD) research, which is the process of understanding problems.

After the two year program, our trainees become technical designers with a broad technological understanding of the disciplines relevant to the above mentioned smart cities themes (architecture, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, building physics and services and ICT), who excel in their own discipline and who are able to work in multidisciplinary design teams, contribute to design issues outside their own core disciplines, integrate different technologies into new products and concepts, and who understand the commercial aspects of these innovative products and concepts.

Job description
The Department of the Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences of the Eindhoven University of Technology offers you a trainee position to follow a two-year post-master technological designer program, which leads to the degree of 'Professional Doctorate in Engineering' (PDEng). The program consists of two main parts running in parallel:

- Half of the program consists of post-master level education in the form of generic design projects and courses about design methods, entrepreneurship and professional skills. Furthermore, it includes several technical courses about topics relevant to SB&C. This part of the program also offers ample opportunity to develop professional skills.

- The other half of the program is dedicated to an individual design project in collaboration with a company. It is the trainee's main responsibility to manage and execute the project. Each trainee is supported by an advisor from the company and an advisor from the university. A business plan for implementation or marketing of the designed product or process is part of the final deliverables.

The company design project related to this traineeship is described below.

Municipalities increasingly invest in energy-efficient lighting such as LED, achieving energy reductions of 22%. These technologies alone are insufficient to reach the cities' targets on energy efficiency and CO2 emissions. This has led to small scale pilots with intelligent lighting systems that adjust lighting intensity to the actual needs, allowing 60% reduction in energy consumption by enhancing energy efficiency (EE). However, only by addressing the unique and diverse requirements of municipalities, who are largely focussed on the citizens and their perspectives, we can make the move towards large-scale uptake of high energy-saving innovations. In the Interreg Smart Spaces project municipalities and key innovation stakeholders (research institutes, SMEs, enterprises and associations) from NL, BE, FR and IE jointly:
Develop and implement an interoperable smart lighting platform technology
Monitor and evaluate smart lighting implementation
Foster long-term and large-scale roll-out.

The goal of this PDEng project is to design and develop business models & replication model and long-term potential assessment for the implementation of smart lighting by assessing applicability and potential performance in other contexts and the development of the roll-out strategy.

Activities:
Contribute to the needs analysis in the front runner (established pilot sites) and follower (next-generation in implementing smart lighting) cities to gain a deep understanding of requirements.
Assessing applicability and potential performance, through an analysis of regulatory, economic, societal, ethical and technical barriers for implementation from a use case perspective to identify actors for adoption of smart lighting in other areas and cities
Development of the roll-out strategy for the value innovation potential of the offered solution. Formulating replicable business models exhibiting suitable technical performance and high replication potential.

The PDEng trainee will be embedded in the Innovation Technology Entrepreneurship & Marketing group - https://www.tue.nl/en/research/research-groups/innovation-technology-ent... For questions about the project contact Sjoerd Romme (a.g.l.romme@tue.nl) or Rianne Valkenburg (a.c.valkenburg@tue.nl).

Further details:
PDEng program Smart Buildings & Cities in Replication potential for Smart Urban Lighting at Einhoven University of Technology