PDEng Position: Multi-Annual Maintenance Model

Would you like to contribute to a more optimized maintenance of infrastructure at the third biggest European airport? Are you passionate about designing solution for complex problems? 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 design project. For the design project, you will work with Heijmans, a listed company that combines activities in property development, residential and non-residential building and infrastructure. 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 Heijmans, you will develop a high-level and creative solution for the given problem.

The challenge

Heijmans is the responsible contractor for the “Airside” area at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. This area covers all infrastructure and provisions on and surrounding the runways, including taxiways, holding bays, service roads, signage and lighting. Heijmans is obliged to present each year a maintenance planning for the next five years to Airport Schiphol which includes more than 300 activities and projects. For planning the maintenance, Heijmans needs to consider among other things the contractually determined infrastructure performance, the available budget, and the operational constraints of the airport. Different stakeholders are directly and indirectly affected by the maintenance activities and their needs have to be addressed in the planning as well. In order to understand the consequences of maintenance for Heijmans and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, multiple data from different sources have to be accessed, preprocessed, integrated, and analyzed. This includes data on infrastructure condition, maintenance costs, and aircraft operation.   

The aim of this design project is to:

“Develop a dynamic and interactive multi-annual maintenance model to determine the consequences of maintenance activities and projects at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol”

The expected outcome of the model to be developed is:

• Integrating and analyzing data from different sources and for different asset types that is required for determining maintenance needs and making maintenance consequences visible;    
• Providing insights into the maintenance consequences for affected stakeholders in terms of maintenance costs, airport operation and infrastructure performance;    
• Allowing the visualization and simulation of maintenance consequences for the planning period, and
• Supporting the coordination between Heijmans and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol on the multi-annual maintenance planning.