The Triumph continues
Floris Nijland was not only awarded the prize for best MSc thesis for the entire faculty of Engineering Technology, which he received at the start of the academic year, but last Friday, November 5, he also got the prize for best thesis in Civil Engineering and Management (CEM). This is not trivial since the criteria for both prizes differ. For this CEM prize main criteria were societal relevance, innovative aspects and quality of both research and reporting. This year’s competition was tough. Out of six nominees that all received 8,5 or 9 as final grade, the jury decided that Floris achieved an excellent score on all aspects. The jury’s report says:
Floris Nijland wrote a thesis on “Improving railway maintenance schedules by including hindrance and capacity constraints in the design process of schedules”. Started from the existing maintenance planning method and then developed an optimization model for the planning of maintenance schedules for both train operators and maintenance contractors, by considering hindrance for parked passenger trains and planned freight trains and the workload for track workers. The model that Floris developed not only has had a large impact on railway maintenance at Prorail, but also in the scientific research community. A paper in a high-impact scientific journal is written and published as well.
Floris performed his MSc thesis at Prorail and was supervised by Kostas Gkiotsalitis and Eric van Berkum.
