UTRECHT, 8 May 2009 – On 7 May, the Pelican Dreams student team won the Strukton case at Create Tomorrow, the world’s biggest student think tank on campus at the Twente University of Technology. The Pelican Dreams team submitted ‘The Vertical Multifunctional Hub’. Strukton Civiel awarded the team prize money and invited its members to further develop the concept.

Pelican Dreams’ idea, where train, metro, bus and car traffic are stacked, facilitates greater transfer speed and comfort, thus increasing public transport capacity. Martijn Smitt, Managing Director of Strukton Civiel and member of the panel of judges representing Strukton, said: “The winning team shone out because it found a creative solution by being socially oriented and smartly combining technology with data traffic flows between computer networks and applying this to physical public transport traffic flows. The concept submitted by Pelican Dreams is so well thought out that we hope to join these students to elaborate upon it further.”

The case involved conceptualising an innovative public transport system for the Dutch Delta Metropolis. The case required a combination of creativity and originality to be assessed on the basis of effectiveness, feasibility, completeness and sound substantiation.

The case ties in with Strukton’s vision of mobility in the future, which must include a supplementary public transport system that makes optimal use of the existing public transport systems. It must create better connections between the regional systems including the intercity and express trains operated between cities and local bus, tram and metro systems.

Within the scope of Create Tomorrow, twelve companies submitted cases on the problems they face in running their day-to-day operations. More than 1,000 technology students, split into 150 teams, focused on finding solutions to these problems. In the space of a day, each team analysed the problems, brainstormed solutions and elaborated further on the solutions that emerged.