Beyond a Tunnel Vision Conference 2024
October 16th, 2024
Room With A Zoo, Antwerp
Tunnels play a vital role in infrastructure. Many of them are aging and in need of major renovations. They cannot be shut down due to the required high availability. Because of the volume and urgency of the tasks, this challenge needs to be addressed on an international scale. Let’s get together and address this at the Beyond a Tunnel Vision Conference in 2024.
Topics
Skills & resources
Infrastructure, particularly in tunnels, faces challenges such as limited personnel, time, and resources. Expertise in tunnels often relies on experience rather than formal education, and there's a lack of global standards for tunnel management. With many experts approaching retirement, there's a pressing need to transfer their knowledge. Digitalization is viewed as a potential solution, but its integration into infrastructure management is intricate. Although there's interest in digital tools like 'digital tunnel twins,' the question remains: Are we prepared for this shift?
Asset management for tunnels
We see a widely spread ambition to become a more asset management organization instead of an organization focused on projects (either building or renovation projects). But what is professional assetmanagement for tunnels and what should be focal points for the upcoming decade?
Renovation, management & maintenance
Cities will suffer massive strokes if we cannot use underground space more effectively and without hindering existing networks, such as metro-systems, and city life at street level. Building and renovating must be done whilst ‘the shop is open for business. We see that each country uses valuable time and money to develop their own strategies and options. Some ‘tweaking’ at a national level is always useful, but we could all benefit from more by sharing data, models, experiences, and options.
What to expect
The program with interesting plenary and parallel sessions will be published as soon as possible. In anticipation, we can already reveal the following three topics will be addressed during the conference.
- Skills and resources; how to manage, maintain, and renovate tunnels with limited resources.
- Asset management for tunnels; professional, data-driven decision-making from a lifecycle perspective.
- Renovation, management, and maintenance with ‘the shop open’; strategies, and options.
If you are an expert on these topics and want to give a presentation or host a workshop during a parallel session, please apply on via the button below before the 10th of May 2024.
Moving forward, together
A well-performing transport infrastructure network is essential for achieving the European ambitions and goals on competitiveness, growth, and jobs, achieving alignment with the UN Agenda 2030 and related sustainability goals. The position of tunnels in European networks is extremely important, but many of the tunnels are aging and need major renovations. Large knowledge gaps make reliable predictive maintenance still impossible and insecure.
Another focal point for underground infrastructure is the strong growth in mobility and urbanization. Cities will suffer massive strokes if we cannot use underground space more effectively and without hindering existing networks, such as metro systems, and city life at street level.
A third focal point is a high demand for adding value. Getting tunnels resilient, making them climate-proof, making them part of a safer network, making them smarter, making them more adaptive to still unknown change, and making the people working in underground infrastructure more capable of working with these challenges.
Because of the volume and urgency of these tasks, we need to change our approach. Infrastructure managers and operators need to work together on a European level.
