PDEng trainee Standardization & Industrialisation of Housing Renovations at Eindhoven University of Technology

Fulltime, two-year trainee position at the PDEng program 'Smart Buildings & Cities' of the Eindhoven University of Technology. The position will be part of a larger team working on a project for the government as part of the National Climate Agreement, aiming to accelerate and support the large-scale sustainable renovation of the housing stock. We are looking for candidates with a strong interest in the built environment and an MSc degree in Architectural Engineering, Building Science, Building, Civil, Mechanical or Environmental Engineering, or equivalent. Knowledge from sustainable renovation and construction processes are essential and experience in Building Information Modelling and software development are beneficial.

Smart Buildings & Cities PDEng program

The Smart Buildings & Cities PDEng program wants to contribute to the transition towards smart, intelligent and sustainable cities where the quality of life is high. This transition requires new solutions which can only be created through multiscale and transdisciplinary (design) approaches. The transition is a relevant theme for society (as reflected by the Horizon 2020 Societal Challenges formulated by the European Commission), building industry and university (consider the TU/e's Strategic Areas: Energy, Health and Smart Mobility and the TU/e's Smart Cities Program).

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 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 energy-related disciplines in the built environment (mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, building physics and services and ICT), who excel in their discipline and who can work in multidisciplinary design teams, contribute to design issues outside their 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 Built Environment 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 SEB&C program consists of two main parts:

1. Workshops. You will follow technical workshops in which you acquire knowledge concerning important concepts of disciplines other than your own (master) specialism. You will follow these workshops with other SEB&C trainees (all with different master specialisms). The workshops increase your ability to effectively and efficiently communicate with these other disciplines in multidisciplinary Pagina | 5

design teams. Furthermore, you will follow workshops on design methods, entrepreneurship and professional skills.

2. Design projects. You will work on a design project with a group of SEB&C trainees and you will work an individual in-company assignment (see description below). The latter is a design project in collaboration with a company and the university. You work within the company structure (facilities, office desk, computer and other required equipment are provided by the company). It is your main responsibility to manage and execute the project. You are supported by an advisor from the company and an advisor from the university. A business plan for implementation or marketing of the project or product is part of the final deliverables.

A significant part of the first year of the program is dedicated to the workshops, while the second year is mostly dedicated to the in-company assignment. Nonetheless, you will start working on the in-company assignment from the start of the program. The in-company assignment related to this traineeship is described below.

As part of the Green New Deal, all European countries will engage in a 'renovation wave' of public and private buildings to achieve a carbon-neutral built environment by 2050. The current European market for the sustainable renovation of the housing stock is too small, leading to high costs and little innovation. As part of the National Climate Agreement of the Netherlands, the acceleration of the large-scale renovation of the housing stock is identified as one of the key challenges. However, in addition to mere scale, the increased demand for renovations should be standardized to create the market conditions that allow for industrialisation and innovation, to ultimately lead to cost reduction. The demand for renovations needs to be structured in a way that will allow the building industry to offer standardized solutions that allow for large scale, high-speed construction processes.

As part of the National Climate Agreement, a few ingredients are identified that are necessary to achieve these ideal market condition for standardization and industrialization. Firstly, housing renovations should not be brought to the market on an individual basis, but instead, they should be clustered to form a couple of hundred housing renovations in one collective procurement 'bid'. Secondly, these larger-scale clusters of housing renovations should consist of similar housing types, with similar renovation measures. Therefore, as part of the overarching project, a housing classification system will be developed, which defines clusters of housing types and their optimal renovation strategies to be adopted in the collective procurement of renovations. For the purpose of 'tendering' these large-scale clusters of renovations, the National Climate Agreement outlines the development of a national web-based platform.

The in-company assignment that this PDEng project will focus on is specifically targeting the development of a prototype system for the large-scale tendering of clusters of housing renovations. Given the renovation solution for a certain type of housing, these can be clustered based on certain spatial or technical characteristics that will allow for standardization and industrialisation. In addition, different types of tendering mechanisms are conceivable (including the auction mechanism). To this end, workshops with contractors will explore what information is needed to tender renovation clusters in a way that allows contractors to align their production processes and achieve economies of scale. In addition, based on successful projects involving large-scale tenders (for example, offshore wind farm auctions), the question of how the tendering system should be set up and adapted to the construction sector is explored. The results will be recorded in a system design and a validation of the prototype system.

Further details:
PDEng trainee Standardization & Industrialisation of Housing Renovations at Eindhoven University of Technology