Support Work Experience of Students in Civil Engineering

AbstractCivil engineering is a field with big demand on the theoretical background and practical experience. Very good theoretical knowledge students acquire during their studies at university, which is in many cases supplemented by theoretical knowledge gained at foreign universities in the frame of the student mobility. In conditions of the Czech educational system, however, there is still rather limited use of opportunities to enrich students’ theoretical education with practical experience in areas that students are studying. There are more ways to bring students to practice. One possibility is to include a mandatory practice in the curriculum of students. Other options can be in the form of organized internships for selected students in companies or excursions of students to major constructions with the participation of persons responsible for their realization. The paper is focused on the characteristic of basic approaches leading to the practical experience of students organized by Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Civil Engineering, and identification of options for its further development

Benefits of Increased Railway Safety and Reliability and their Evaluation

The paper focuses on the presentation of key results of the project of applied research oriented on evaluation of the increased safety and reliability of the railway network due to the implementation of relevant railway network projects and their projection into the investment project socio-economic evaluation using Cost-Benefit Analysis. The subject research described in the article is the design and verification of the functionality of the methodological procedure for the evaluation of these benefits for their further use in the assessment of public projects on railways. The methodological part summarizes the basic outputs of the previous research. These outputs were subsequently applied at the formulation of basic rules for the assessment of benefits connected with increased railway reliability and safety, which were later processed into the form of simplified methodological procedure. The simplified approach uses average data on the occurrence impact for the entire railway network, broken down into line and station sections. The functionality of individual approaches was checked on case studies of actually implemented projects

Accident costs on the railway network in the Czech national conditions

The issue of assessing socio-economic impacts represent a key element of the decisionmaking process on the implementation of major public investment projects. The correctness of the decision depends both on the chosen principle of the socio-economic analysis and the input data. The presented article focuses on updating selected input values for the socio-economic assessment of railway infrastructure projects. Specifically, the simplified values of the estimated rail accidents costs. Accident costs are used for considering the change in the safety. At present, these values, which are also stated in the national methodological resources, are based on statistical data of the entire European Union and thus do not reflect the possible national specifics of projects implemented in the territory of individual Member States. The principle of updating values is from a methodological point of view based on the original calculation principles, however, involves a set of information items on the occurrences that emerged in the past in a specific area. The output of the article is a set of methodological steps considering national conditions when determining the average accident costs, subsequently verified on a case study of the railway network in the Czech Republic. The outputs of the presented article directly build on the results of the research project in which the team of article authors has been involved. The research results refer to different values of accident costs uniformly determined for the entire European Union territory and those determined individually for the conditions of the railway infrastructure in the Czech Republic

Estimating the value of public construction works in Poland and the Czech Republic

The article outlines the legislation concerning the methodology of estimating the value of works in Poland and the Czech Republic. In both countries it is necessary for the public investor to respect the law governing public procurement, which defines the structure of compulsory documents needed for the tender documentation, but not directly the way of their preparation. In both countries, though, there exist model proceeding schedules for the calculation of the value of a public procurement for construction works. To illustrate and compare the calculation methods a sample calculation of the procurement value is presented for a selected thermal efficiency improvement project

Evaluation of Socio-economic Impacts of Incidents on the Railway Infrastructure

Evaluation of the economic efficiency of investment projects in transport infrastructure in the Czech Republic is methodically based on the Departmental Methodology of the Ministry of Transport. Economic cash flows, generated in accordance with the CBA principles, are modelled within this methodology on the basis of the evaluation of socio-economic impact of individual projects. In the case of the railway infrastructure constructions, the socio-economic impacts used by the methodology do not include benefits associated with increasing safety and reliability of the railway infrastructure network due to new security systems implementation. Determination of socio-economic impacts associated with specific types of incidents on the railway which are caused by insufficient railway infrastructure security and which could be eliminated by the implementation of the higher-level signaling equipment forms the subject of the research. The research is based on the analysis of a database of incidents occurring on the railway in the Czech Republic in the 2009– 2018 period, which describes the basic impacts associated with a particular incident. Statistical data on the railway infrastructure is also used to determine the impact of incidents in addition to the database. The key outcomes of the research are the determination of methodological steps for the evaluation of the impacts of incidents on the railway and a case study for their verification. Future research will focus on making evaluation of the above-mentioned benefits more detailed. Research outcomes will improve decision-making process on selection and financing of the projects related to railway infrastructure safety for their future implementation