The 15th WCM Summer School 2026 on Maintenance Management & Engineering will be held in the fourth week of August (24th-28th of August 2026), on the educational facilities of the Royal Netherlands Army in Den Helder.
The WCM Summer School offers an exciting and interesting program of workshops showing the multi-disciplinary aspects of modern Maintenance Management & Engineering. The workshops in the WCM Summer School will be provided by top professors in Maintenance Management & Engineering in The Netherlands.
Participants will have the time to use the gained knowledge to design improvements to the maintenance program of a case study organization. On the last day student groups will present solutions to the problems posed in the case study and a winner will be selected by a jury of representatives from industry and academia.
The two hour workshops consist of a lecture part and an application part in which the theory and knowledge will be applied on an existing case organization.
Smart Maintenance
The workshops align to the maintenance themes identified in the Smart Maintenance report of WCM:
Big data analytics, Performance based contracting, Life Cycle costing, Asset portfolio management, Condition based Maintenance, Integration of Asset IT systems, Design for Maintenance, Smart sensoring, Degradation models and Service supply chains.
Besides the workshops , a real case study with company visit, a unique military leadership training given by the Dutch Defense Academy and case study presentation are on the program.
During the Summer School there will also be many opportunities for networking.
Description workshops WCM Summer School 2026 (preliminary)
Smart Maintenance theme: PERFORMANCE BASED CONTRACTS & Life cycle costing
Workshop: Life Cycle Costing
Prof. dr. Willem van Groenendaal – University of Tilburg
Life Cycle Costing (LCC) analyzes the “cradle-to-grave” cost of ownership, going beyond traditional accounting to capture hidden expenses like maintenance and end-of-life disposal. In the workshop, LCC is compared with Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), while examining practical applications both inside and outside the EU. Additionally, LCC is compared against metrics like Net Present Value (NPV), and the value of incorporating sensitivity and uncertainty analyses is explored. Together, the workshop provides a framework for making better informed, long-term investment decisions.
Workshop: Performance contracting: when and how to make them work
Dr.ir. Wendy van der Valk – Tilburg University
Performance contracts have long been viewed as a panacea for challenging contracting situations. In this workshop, we will look into the features of a performance-based contract and when to use them and when not. Building on the results of three different studies, we will subsequently look into the topics of measuring contracted performance, governance of the ongoing buyer-supplier collaboration, and how to go about performance contracts when performance relies on data and data-sharing between buyers and suppliers, as for example is the case in smart asset maintenance outsourcing.
Smart maintenance theme: Condition and Risk Based
SMART MAINTENANCE THEME: BIG DATA ANALYTICS
Workshop: Data driven decision support; a maintenance case.
Dr. Chris Rijsdijk – Royal Netherlands Navy
This workshop will depart from a system that serves a purpose. To manage a system, knowledge about it is indispensable but does knowledge follow from data? Scepticism about this positivist viewpoint has a long history dating back to the Ancient Greeks. Still, experience reflected in data matters. Also in the field of maintenance it often holds that an experienced veteran (with access to data from the past) outperforms a novice. So, although data does not logically imply knowledge, it may still provide meaningful decision support in practice.
Having set the scenery, we proceed with the actual use of data to support decisions at the Royal Netherlands Army (RNLA). Results from the main pilot project at RNLA will be shared and some prospective regarding data driven decision support will be outlined.
Smart maintenance theme: Smart sensoring / Degradation models
Workshop: Predictive maintenance – Practical issues and scientific challenges
Prof.dr.ir. Tiedo Tinga – Netherlands Defence Academy
To optimize maintenance programs it is important to understand the failure behaviour of systems and components and have insight in the governing loads. In this module the different load types, the basic principles of various failure mechanisms, like overload, fatigue, wear and corrosion, will be discussed. Furthermore, monitoring techniques will be addressed for the application of in preventive maintenance and structural health and condition monitoring.