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

Environment Risk Management of Warehouse and Production Hall Investment Projects

Planning, implementation and operation of buildings and related outdoor areas in accordance with the principle of sustainable construction represent a current topic. Important elements of sustainability include the environmental impact assessment of construction works which may include CO2 emissions. Warehouses and manufacturing facilities are significant environmental polluters and emitters of CO2. Management of industrial companies seeks to manage this environmental risk and find ways of its reduction within the framework of sustainable development. The article deals with environmental risk management in general, its identification, assessment methods and development of the countermeasures to reduce or eliminate them. Continuous monitoring and control of the functioning of the measures represent an important component of their management. An analysis of a research sample of warehouse and manufacturing facility projects located in industrial zones shows that if companies fail to continuously reduce emissions, they may face secondary risks which may be related to the company's social impact, sales or reputation of the company and may affect, for example, their share prices. The output of the research presented in this article is a list of initiatives on reducing environmental risks (especially CO2) of warehouses and manufacturing facilities, determination of the costs associated with them and assessment of the socioeconomic impacts (benefits to society). The research serves as one of the steps towards determining the overall socio-economic effectiveness of these measures

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

New aspects of socioeconomic assessment of the railway infrastructure project life cycle

The paper deals with the issue of evaluation of socioeconomic impacts of occurrences emerging from railway infrastructure. The presented research results form part of a broader research subject focusing on the evaluation of the socioeconomic benefits of projects for the implementation of measures aimed at increasing the safety and reliability of railway infrastructure. The research topic addresses a part of the evaluation of railway infrastructure project efficiency within its life cycle using the cost–benefit analysis method. The methodology is based on the description and definition of input variables that are essential for the process of evaluating socioeconomic impacts. It is followed by another important step, which is the analysis of the categories and the number of occurrences, separately, for regional and national lines, and, further, the data is sorted according to whether occurrences emerge at stations or on a wide line. The result of the presented research is an overview of the calculated values of the expected socioeconomic impacts of partial occurrences according to the categories related to the year of operation on the railway infrastructure and the unit of measure. The research team carried out an inquiry into the annual impacts of the subcategories of occurrences related to one railway station and one kilometer of wide line, e.g., for national lines, the impacts of €2922.72/station/year and €41.67/km of wide line/year were determined. The results of the presented research represent important and necessary inputs for the next phase of the research topic, i.e., the evaluation of the socioeconomic benefits of projects increasing the safety and reliability of railway infrastructure

Influence of Railway Control and Signaling Equipment on Reduction of Occurrences in the State Railway Network of Czech Republic

The paper develops the issue of the evaluation of investment projects in the area of the national railway infrastructure solved within the research project. The research projects is focused on the evaluation of benefits connected with the increasing of the safety and the reliability of the railway infrastructure due to the realization of projects including investments into managing and security equipment. The paper is focused on the identification of the relation between the change of the level of security on the railway and the change of the number of occurrences on the railway. The methodology of the research consists in the analysis of the database of occurrences obtained from the sources of the Railway Infrastructure Administration, which includes approximately 1 000 occurrences annually per last ten years (2009 – 2018). The database includes detailed information about registered occurrences. The output of the partial part of the research is the identification of the relation between specific occurrence and its cause and the level of the security in the place of the origin of the occurrence. The results of the research will be consequently used for the evaluation of benefits connected with the increasing of the safety and the reliability of the railway

Evaluation of Economic Efficiency of Territory Development

The article deals with the analysis of background resources for the evaluation of socio-economic impact methodology elaboration of the territory development in the field of commercial, service and residential properties, mixed constructions and multifunctional buildings in the first phase of their life cycle. The research team investigated the possibilities of using the information and procedures for the evaluation of socio-economic impacts of the territory development. Relevant data for the evaluation was identified and analysed on the research sample of 12 major urban districts of the city of Brno. Technical and social parameters that appeared relevant for the economic evaluation of the surveyed location development were identified based on the available data on individual territories. The first identification step was their description. Subsequently, suitable metrics for their evaluation were examined. Findings about what socio-economic impacts these locations create in the field of interest and whether these impacts are efficient in terms of their functioning represent the output of the paper. This includes determining the overall economic efficiency of the implementation phase of their life cycle. This output then forms base for the future research focusing on the possibility of including other variables that shall focus on the operational phase of the life cycle and extend the assessment to a wider timeframe