The KBE Challenge is an exciting opportunity for bright students to apply their skills and develop innovative solutions to real-world engineering challenges. It consists of two key phases:
Academic KBE Course
Students first dive into KBE principles and application development through a structured academic course. Working in teams of two, 60–120 students design smart automation solutions for routine engineering tasks. These tasks, provided by companies across various industries—not just aerospace—offer hands-on experience in solving real industry problems.
KBE Competition
The challenge culminates in a thrilling competition where 5–6 top teams present their applications. A diverse jury of academics and industry experts from engineering and software disciplines evaluates the solutions based on innovation, problem-solving, code quality, and more.
400+
Students
50
Companies
8
Years
200+
Automation apps
This KBE challenge is also where the opportunity comes. Students are generally very excited to solve real-world problems. So instead of inventing their own, they are more thrilled to get real challenges from industry. And we generally also see that industry is enthusiastic about the chance to have students prototype an application for which there currently is no time, money or are of a high-risk-high-reward nature. Companies are always positively surprised by what the students were able to achieve in such a short amount of time. It is usually also the base on which internal buy-in is created, follow-up development can commence, potentially even by providing these students an internship or thesis opportunity to continue their work.
“The combination of KBE and Parapy is extremely valuable for the engineering industry. It allows companies to retain their knowledge, come to solutions very quickly, and find the best possible solution through a multidisciplinary design approach. With everything automated and parameterized, companies can freeze design decisions as late as possible. This enables engineers to fully investigate the design space, quickly consider multiple options, and avoid settling for just one design due to time constraints. When everything is automated, you have the time to explore and optimize—making it an invaluable tool for any company.”
Gianfranco La Rocca
Associate Professor at Delft University of Technology
Some highlights from previous KBE editions
Fokker Aerostructures - Fuselage Structural Analyzer
The app streamlines the trade of fuselage layouts, enabling effortless modelling and analysis of key structural elements. Integrated with the FEM software Abaqus for precise structural analysis, the app eliminates manual work and speeds up design iterations, saving time and enabling design space exploration.
Rondal - Rig Designer
The Mast-er of Cabling app allows the user to quickly define and alter sailing ship’s mast-rigging designs based on simple inputs. It gives the user freedom to arrange the rig based on their judgement while allowing easy manipulation and automatic rearrangements through the knowledge-based philosophy. Included in the app, is a direct interface to the FEM software Strand7 enabling an easy and efficient workflow between the two applications.
SEMCO - Industrial Building Planner
The app optimizes the placement of several electrical systems in the floorplan of an industrial building. This allows the tedious and repetitive task of calculating the number of required materials and the puzzle of determining the physical location of systems to be performed automatically leading to a faster and more coherent process.
Dura Vermeer – Train Track Designer
This app was built to accelerate the design of support structures for overhead high voltage cabling used by trains. The app takes as an input a drawing of a section of track, and interprets it. It automates the design process for each support structure, and has an integrated structural calculation tool for structural integrity assessments. Furthermore the app can directly output the design into a design drawing, with an accompanying calculation report.
GKN Aerospace - Vane Generator
The app enables the automatic generation and aerodynamic (CFD) analysis of aeroengine static vanes, to asses the performance of turbine exit stator vanes with respect to flow deswirl and pressure loss. This eliminates the manual and repetitive tasks of arranging components, meshing, setting up the aerodynamic analysis, and results processing, which are often time consuming.
Joining KBE challenge is free and effortless!
Process & Timeline
Companies provide a half-pager with a general, non-confidential description of the problem and required functionality. It should purposely remain high-level, because it is the students’ job to further elicit requirements and study the engineering domain (after all, also knowledge acquisition is an important trait of the future Knowledge Worker). Company representative are available for a project kick-off (1-2 hours), for answering questions during the execution of the project (3-4 hours) and a final demo inside your company allowing students to present the results to internal stakeholders (1 hour).
Mid-Feb
Companies provide half-pagers to students, who start ParaPy training.
End-Mar
Students finalize the description of the assignment.
Early May
Students have their examination sessions.
Jul - Dec
KBE competition
event 2025.
Turn your ideas into reality through the KBE Challenge!
This yearly competition is between the best student teams selected from the course. They will demonstrate their respective applications as developed during the course to the public and a technical jury. The jury consisting of members from industry and academia will then interview the teams and decide who to crown as the KBE champion.
