ARCHES and SPENS Final Seminar – Ljubljana

The seminar was organized by the Slovenian National Building and Civil Engineering Institute, within the EC 6th Framework Programme project CERTAIN that is coordinating a cluster of projects dedicated to road infrastructure research in the NMS and other Central and Eastern European Countries. The main purpose of the event was to present to the international audience the final results of two other EU-projects from this cluster: SPENS (Sustainable Pavements for European New Member States), which research was aiming at finding new construction materials for road pavement engineering and their environmental impacts, and ARCHES (Assessment and Rehabilitation of Central European Highway Structures), which was focusing on more efficient assessment and rehabilitation of bridges. The two three-year projects ended at the end of August 2009.

The seminar highlighted several practical examples of road engineering, such as:

• developments and applications of new materials and technologies in the construction and rehabilitation of road infrastructure, pavements and highway structures
• environmental issues in road engineering,
• optimised assessment of highway structures as a precondition for an optimal use of the available financial resources
• measurements of real traffic loadings and various applications of the data,
• procedures and tools for finding relevant information about the latest developments in the field.

More about the seminar: ARCHES and SPENS Final Seminar