How can the availability of the Cougar helicopter go up and how can deployment be more flexible from a maintenance perspective? And what lessons do we take to the successor of the Cougar? These questions were central to the practical case of the Royal Air Force during the twelfth WCM Summer School.

This year, Gasunie provided the case for the eleventh edition of the WCM Summer School. A case consisting of several layers and questions, explains Scholte Strikwerda. “It is a challenging mega-case, in which the overriding question is how we can properly manage the imbalance in energy demand in time and place within the Netherlands as a whole.”

As part of the energy transition, Gasunie’s entire transport network must be converted and/or renewed. This is an investment running into billions, which is subject to time pressure, involves many uncertainties and has to deal with changing frameworks. “The situation in Ukraine is of course a shining example. Developments are exceptionally fast these days, also in technology. It is all less predictable than before. You want to look far ahead, but within that you have to be as flexible as possible”, Strikwerda explains.

This year’s WCM Summer School is dedicated to ‘Doorstroming als een Service’ (DaeS). Former Summer School participant Bianca Coolen from Heijmans Infra talks about the case and her experiences with the Summer School. “We are looking for technical-substantive advice and tips on working together between organisations with different interests,” she says.

“DaeS is new, new, new; it is new in the way of cooperation, in the form of contract, in the contract period of twenty years, and also the techniques we want to apply are new. We are trying to apply techniques that will not get in the way of future developments. For example, we are laying a glass fibre network with more fibres than are currently required. Because who knows how much data we will be sending in twenty years’ time,” says Coolen.