Mobility and transportation play an important role at the foundations of our society. Mobility gives each individual the opportunity to participate in and benefit from education, work and leisure activity. As people's expectations and demands have risen with regard to their homes, work, hobbies and leisure, public and private passenger transport have increased dramatically. Germany's central location in Europe has made it a major transport region. The combined impact of EU enlargement, globalization and an economy characterized by ever greater specialization and division of labor means that passenger and goods transportation are set to increase further in the future. Mobility for the individual is vital to freedom, growth and prosperity, but the phenomenon of mass transport is the source of major problems for society and the environment, which can only be tackled with innovative engineering and methods.
The customary path to becoming a "transportation engineer" was via civil engineering, which covers methods of planning, building and operating transportation infrastructure, i.e. the transportation routes, or via mechanical engineering and its methods of planning, building and operating vehicles. Modern traffic management methods, comprising the areas traffic information and traffic control, combine elements of the transportation infrastructure (e.g. in the detection of traffic conditions) and of the vehicles (e.g. navigation) and have only become possible thanks to advances in traffic telematics, i.e. in telecommunications and computer science. In addition to this, transportation engineers have to fulfill a more formidable set of requirements than ever before, due to factors such as the increasing privatization and market-driven focus of formerly state-run institutions and the increasing level of technology employed in transportation, which have led to information and communication services set up primarily by private business.
The need to develop new and improved methods and techniques to solve future transportation problems presents transportation engineers with new advanced challenges and their training must reflect these. This clearly calls for a suitable combination of relevant elements from the field of transportation as covered in the civil engineering degree with automotive and systems engineering from the mechanical engineering degree; information and communications engineering from the electrical engineering degree; plus elements of computer science, social sciences and business studies including logistics. The transportation engineer of the future must possess at least fundamental skills in all of these areas (Bachelor degree) before going on to specialize in a certain subject area in accordance with his or her abilities (Master degree). The interdisciplinary degree programme "Mobilität und Verkehr" at the TU Braunschweig is the first undergraduate programme with a bachelor/master structure at a German university that encompasses the field of transportation in its entire breadth.
There can be no better location for the establishment of an interdisciplinary degree programme for "Mobilität und Verkehr" than the TU Braunschweig. The transportation sector features heavily both in local business in the Braunschweig region, with the major presence of transport-related industries (e.g. Volkswagen AG, Siemens Transportation Systems, Alstom) and in public institutions (e.g. the Federal Civil Aviation Authority (LBA), the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Braunschweig Research Airport). A large section of the region's population works in the transportation sector and Braunschweig is regarded as a center of transportation expertise. The establishment of the "Mobility and Transportation" degree is an example of how the TU Braunschweig is focusing on the local economy and society in its strategic planning objectives.
The introduction of this new programme of study also raises the prospect of greater collaboration in research between departments and industry in and beyond the Braunschweig region.
Responsible:
Martin Woiton
Feedback to move@tu-braunschweig.de
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