Doctoral Position in Risk-Based Inspection and Maintenance Planning of Tunnels

Description

Offer Description: Doctoral Position in Risk-Based Inspection and Maintenance Planning of Tunnels The Chair of Infrastructure Management, led by Professor Dr. Bryan T. Adey within the Institute of Construction and Infrastructure Management of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, has an opening for a doctoral student. This position focuses risk-based inspection and maintenance planning for tunnels, including probabilistic risk updating, Value of Information analysis, and intervention program optimisation. This position is part of an interdisciplinary SNSF project in collaboration with the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, the Hagerbach Test Gallery, and the EuroTube Foundation. The preferred starting date is 1 February 2027, although other dates are negotiable. Project background Tunnels are critical links in transport networks, and many Swiss road and rail tunnels are ageing while being subject to increasing traffic loads, climate-related stressors, and evolving safety requirements. Their maintenance involves two interdependent asset domains, namely structural elements, such as lining, portals, and drainage, and mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, such as ventilation, lighting, and fire detection. In current practice, these domains are managed largely in isolation, inspections remain heavily manual, and evidence from different campaigns, sensors, and specialists is fragmented across separate reports and databases. Interventions are therefore often planned using disjointed evidence and conservative heuristics, even where substantial data exist. The project Predictive, Resilient, Integrated Systems for Management of Tunnel (PRISM-T), funded by the SNSF, addresses this challenge through an integrated digital twin workflow for tunnel maintenance decision support. Heterogeneous inspection and monitoring evidence is transformed into uncertainty-aware condition indicators, which are used to update risk, to assess whether additional information is worth collecting, and to derive executable intervention programs. Extended reality (XR) is used to validate decisions and to guide inspection and maintenance work on site. The workflow is developed and validated in the Tunnel Digitalisation Centre of the Hagerbach Test Gallery in Flums, and its transferability is tested at the DemoTube facility of the EuroTube Foundation in Dübendorf. Regular field work at both sites and close collaboration with the partner team in Bolzano form an integral part of the doctoral research. Within this project, the doctoral position addresses the decision layer of the workflow, in which maintenance decision processes are formalised and uncertainty-aware condition indicators, developed in a companion doctoral position, are used to update risk and to optimise intervention programs under realistic tunnel constraints. Job description The successful candidate will map and formalise current tunnel maintenance decision processes for the structural and mechanical, electrical, and plumbing domains through workshops and interviews with practitioners. On this basis, risk and consequence models based on Bayesian networks will be formulated, and incremental risk updating methods will be developed. A computationally tractable Value of Information analysis will be developed using approximation strategies, such as surrogate models and scenario reduction. Intervention program optimisation models accounting for sequencing, bundling, access windows, and resource constraints will be formulated and solved, with outputs traceable to the underlying evidence. The candidate will contribute to validation campaigns at the Hagerbach Test Gallery and the EuroTube Foundation. Profile A Master’s degree in civil engineering, operations research, industrial engineering, applied mathematics, or a related field A strong background in probabilistic modelling, reliability and risk analysis, and mathematical optimisation Very good programming skills, preferably

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Source

Source: euraxess.ec.europa.eu