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.
Early Bird
Until August 31st., 2024 you get a discount, so your registration fee will be € 150,00.
You can cancel until August 31st., 2024 with a full refund.
Keynote Speaker
Alfons van Marrewijk
Full Professor of Construction Cultures at Technische Universiteit Delft
Alfons will share a new and inspiring perspective on the work of asset managers. With growing challenges and the continuous demand of society to keep critical infrastructure open at all times, the responsibility of tunnel managers increases. By presenting a wide range of learnings from international examples, he will provide practical ideas that will inspire the European asset management community to start looking for more international cooperation and smart learning.
Topics
Skills & resources
Facing challenges from personnel shortages to the intricacies of digital integration, the world of tunnel infrastructure stands at a critical crossroads between traditional expertise and the promise of digitalization—are we ready for the future it beckons?
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
As cities teeter on the brink of infrastructural collapse, the urgent call to optimize underground spaces while keeping urban life uninterrupted echoes globally, suggesting that shared knowledge could be the key to innovative, unified strategies.
What to expect
We are happy to announce that Alfons van Marrewijk, Professor of Construction Cultures at TU Delft University of Technology, will be one of the keynote speakers.
The full program with interesting plenary and parallel sessions will be published soon. In anticipation, we can already reveal the following three topics will be addressed during the conference.
- Skills and resources; managing, maintaining, and renovating 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 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.
