The 13th WCM Summer School 2024 on Maintenance Management & Engineering will be held from Monday the 29th of July to Friday the 2nd of August 2024 and will be hosted in Breda/Woensdrecht, on the education facilities of the Royal Netherlands Army.
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 are mapping with the currently most important maintenance themes identified in the Smart Maintenance report of WCM:
Big data analytics, Performance based contracting, Life Cycle costing, Asset portflio 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 2024 (preliminary)
Smart Maintenance theme: Design for Maintenance
Workshop: Asset Management and Design for Maintenance Operations challenges at NS
Prof. dr. ir. Leo van Dongen – University of Twente
In this workshop an introduction to Asset Management and Design for Maintenance Operations challenges at NS is presented.
Optimal management of capital goods is vital in terms of satisfying the need for sustainability, safety and reliability in society. Moreover, the expenditure associated with the maintenance of production equipment often amounts to several times the investment costs.
Maintenance is a “wide-ranging subject” that must be reviewed during the entire life-cycle of an installation: from initial definition of the requirements, design, implementation, use, overhaul and modernization to dismantling. In other words, collaboration between designers, managers, mechanics, operators, economists, controllers and financiers is important for optimizing the performance of operational assets in line with the life-cycle costs. In this respect, it is essential that the various disciplines involved collaborate from the point of view of having a common interest in the chain, not only inside, but also outside the company.
The technical design of an installation must have a maintenance concept. In accordance with this concept, production managers can then prepare, plan and execute the required activities. It is fairly obvious that performance can only be enhanced and costs can only be reduced with joint efforts for these disciplines.
The nature of maintenance concepts that, up to now has been quite static, is becoming increasingly more flexible due to the large-scale implementation of sensors and digital diagnosis and control systems. This enables the current maintenance requirement to be determined online, maintenance tasks to be planned, and even defects to be predicted on the basis of the trend analysis.
In relation to the full scope of the field of maintenance work, this course focuses on the permanent improvement of:
- design for maintenance with basic knowledge in the field of technologies such as physical phenomena, design methods, analytical techniques and decision models (design for maintenance);
- maintenance concepts that enable the added value of the assets to be retained at the desired level with feasible maintenance planning and execution (maintenance engineering);
- and the interrelationship between them.
SMART MAINTENANCE THEME: PERFORMANCE BASED CONTRACTING
Workshop: Maintenance Outsourcing Dynamics
Prof. dr. Henk Akkermans – University of Tilburg
The bulk of the work in maintenance is being outsourced to a broad array of 3rd parties, and from a variety of contractual relations. In this workshop, we will present at a formal typology of contractual settings in so-called maintenance service triads. We will look at how dynamic decision-making becomes different for asset owner, contractor and service provider under different contractual arrangements, and on how this affects the overall performance of this interorganizational network. Real-world examples from various industries, both process and discrete, will be provided.
Smart Maintenance theme: Life cycle costing
Workshop: Maintenance Outsourcing Dynamics
Prof. dr. Willem van Groenendaal – University of Tilburg
The bulk of the work in maintenance is being outsourced to a broad array of 3rd parties, and from a variety of contractual relations. In this workshop, we will present at a formal typology of contractual settings in so-called maintenance service triads. We will look at how dynamic decision-making becomes different for asset owner, contractor and service provider under different contractual arrangements, and on how this affects the overall performance of this interorganizational network. Real-world examples from various industries, both process and discrete, will be provided.
Smart maintenance theme: Condition and Risk Based Maintenance
Workshop: Modelling predictive models with python
Dr.ir. Roland van der Kerkhof – University of Tilburg
ir. Jacob Derks (WCM)
T.b.a.
Smart maintenance theme: Smart sensoring / Degradation models
Workshop: Physical Phenomena and monitoring
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.
Workshop: Predictive Maintenance
Dr. Wieger Tiddens – Royal Netherlands Navy
The use of predictive maintenance (PdM) has become increasingly popular in recent years. PdM refers to a maintenance policy that triggers maintenance activities by predictions of failures. To obtain accurate predictions, PdM is typically based on a set of activities that inform (the owner, service provider or operator) about the current, and preferably also the future state of their physical assets. For this, PdM employs analytics, methods and techniques that use asset data, such as condition and loading data or experience, to detect or predict changes in the physical condition of equipment (signs of failure).
Although predictive maintenance offers various benefits to asset owners, OEMs and service providers, the adoption of PdM in practice seems to lag behind the theoretical understanding of its use. Practitioners experience a gap between the potential and realized benefits. The latter may be due to an inadequate understanding of how firms can achieve these benefits and the means that are required to translate those benefits into tangible value propositions.
This workshop will discuss the use of predictive maintenance in practice and provide participants means to overcome typical difficulties in the implementation of predictive maintenance. This workshop will not only regard the technical aspects but also deal with the often overlooked organizational aspects of PdM implementations. This workshop provides structured guidance that assists participants in the implementation of PdM in their own organizations by discussing real-world examples that can be brought in by participants during the workshop.
SMART MAINTENANCE THEME: BIG DATA ANALYTICS
Workshop: Data driven decision support; a maintenance case.
Dr. Chris Rijsdijk – Netherlands Defense Academy
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.