PDEng Sustainable Maintenance Planning of Highways at University of Twente

Would you like to contribute to crafting and developing better contracts for road maintenance? Are you passionate about high-end technological design? Then, this Professional Doctorate in Engineering (PDEng) programme may be for you. The PDEng is a 2-year post Master Degree technological designers programme. This programme contains an educational part and a project. For the project, you work at Rijkswaterstaat responsible for managing the Dutch highway network. The educational programme will have an in-depth character with ample attention for professional development and is partly tailored to the design project. Together with Rijkswaterstaat, you will develop a high-level and creative solution for the given problem.

An important goal of Rijkswaterstaat is to be 100% climate neutral and sustainable in 2050. At the moment, Rijkswaterstaat still plans the maintenance for the highway network without full consideration of sustainable aspects. One reason for this is the uncertainty about effects of maintenance measures on sustainability, for example, the effect of the use of different materials on the CO2 emissions of traffic. Another reason is the unclear implication of sustainability for the life-cycle costs of highways, for example, to which extent does the reusability of material outweigh its shorter lifetime. The current challenge for Rijkswaterstaat lies in incorporating sustainable aspects in the maintenance planning and improving the understanding of sustainable maintenance strategies and their cost implications.

The aim of this design project is to:

“Develop a decision-support tool to improve the sustainability assessment of maintenance strategies for highways”

Further details:
PDEng Sustainable Maintenance Planning of Highways at University of Twente