The EDC 'Best Student Award' goes to: Robin Wendel!

As an ESRI Development Center, Z_GIS every year has the opportunity to nominate one top student based on his or her software development competence. This year this special honour is awarded to Robin Wendel for his MSc Thesis based on the development of an Interactive Network Assessment Tool for Evaluating Bicycle Infrastructure.

Mr. Wendel has addressed a timely and critically important topic in his Master thesis: Road safety is a core element of any bicycle mobility promotion strategy. In order to provide a basis for evidence-based decisions and improvement measures, as a first step the bicycle safety of a road network needs to be assessed. Up to now, this safety assessment used a-priori defined input parameters and weights. The definition and calibration of these settings require a huge effort and expertise in spatial data modelling and often result in an averaged assessment result not considering specific local or environmental circumstances (e.g. urban vs. rural).


The web tool developed by Mr Wendel facilitates interactive selection and calibration of input parameters by domain experts. The results of any parameter changes are immediately displayed, controlled and  updated online. With this, the original assessment procedure can be adapted to a dynamic process, making the results more transparent and comprehensible. Additionally, it becomes obvious which specific measures contribute to which extent to the overall safety measure of each road segment. Thus the tool is perfectly suited for simulation and planning purposes. In his thesis, Mr. Wendel demonstrated advanced skills and competences in the areas of spatial data modeling, indicator based analysis, geodatabase design, and web-based application development using the ArcGIS API for JavaScript.

Congratulations to this distinction, and to continuing a tradition of excellence established by previous recipients of this award (Mariana Belgiu, Bernhard Vockner, Christoph Mayerhofer, Caroline Atzl and Eva-Maria Schönauer), thus serving as an outstanding role model for future generations of Geoinformatics students in Salzburg!