PDEng Data Analytics of Maintenance Contracts at University of Twente

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.

The challenge

Rijkswaterstaat contracts out the maintenance of the highway network by using different contract types. Due to variations in duration, payment mechanism and scope these contract types set different incentives for contractors to maintain highways. Compared to the maintenance planning of Rijkswaterstaat, contractors may apply activities earlier or later, or to an extent that is not in line with the planning. Although Rijkswaterstaat possesses comprehensive data about planned and executed highway maintenance, the challenge is to reveal the influence of the contract type on maintenance outcome and cost from the available data.

The aim of this design project is to:

“Develop a data analytic approach to improve the understanding of the effectiveness and efficiency of maintenance contracts for highways”

The expected outcome of the approach to be developed is:

Detecting possible deviations between maintenance planning and maintenance execution
Comparing actual and planned maintenance costs
Relating cost and planning data to contract types for maintenance
Predicting the lifetime of highway sections as a result of contracting
Adjusting predictions based on new maintenance and contract data
In the course program you get a customised education package consisting of, among others, courses in decision-support system design, systems engineering & design, machine learning, operations research, statistics, and asset management.

Further details:
PDEng Data Analytics of Maintenance Contracts at University of Twente