Responding to the challenges of industry Prof Wynand Steyn
Engineers need to be educated to be resilient, with the required knowledge base to adapt their skills to a changing environment, with continuous value addition when analysing any engineering problem. Against this background, educators should resist placing too much emphasis on applied technologies at undergraduate level. The focus should be on teaching principles that will not change with evolving technologies.
It is therefore necessary for both the new engineer and the engineering educator to reflect on what a pavement engineer should be able to do in the next 50 years to ensure that they are trained and educated for continuous changes in their careers. In this way, engineers who were trained using the slide ruler in the previous millennium were able to survive and excel in a world of computers and tablets, as their fundamental training supported their ability to use new technologies that did not even exist when they were at university. An aspect that should never be neglected in the education of engineers is the ability to communicate effectively. Based on their confidence in their knowledge of the basic and engineering sciences, an engineer should be in a position to listen to the requirements for a specific project, clearly analyse and synthesise the fundamental issue, develop a solution, and then communicate this solution to both specialists and laymen with confidence and clarity. Some of the critical issues in transportation for the next two decades have been identified as transformational technologies and services, resilience and security, system performance and asset management, goods movement, institutional and workforce capacity, and research and innovation. The expected effects of the 4IR on the life of a pavement engineer may include changes in pavement 32
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structures due to the wandering patterns of autonomous vehicles, changes in materials due to developments in nanotechnology, changes in traffic loading due to vehicle technology developments, the availability of traditional materials such as bitumen and the need to develop novel road pavement surfacing options. An in-depth understanding of materials science and chemistry is probably becoming increasingly important to understand the interactions between materials and the environment. The interaction between civil engineering and electronic engineering (known as Civiltronics) is another field that may become more applicable in the next few years.  
In order to work towards smart cities, there is a need to develop researchers with advanced skills in robotics, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and satellite technology.
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