Fresh water availability for agriculture in the Dutch coastal area is limited and under pressure of climate-change. AGRICOAST aims to enhance the fresh water availability by means of various technological innovations and management solutions; make optimal use of both current and enhanced water resources for agricultural crop production; and support the societal transition towards climate-adaptive agriculture, based on evaluation of existing and newly designed interventions and governance. By means of design-based research, the uptake of the developed water management and crop production innovations is facilitated to pave the way to self-sufficient and climate(-change) robust agriculture in the Dutch coastal region.

High-tech systems are produced in a joint effort of some hundred teams of highly specialized engineers employed by the system integrator and dozens of suppliers. Because of the sheer size and complexity of the supply chain, it is impossible to oversee the entire operation. Instead, the process is somehow orchestrated by sharing information and coordinating the production planning between upstream teams that produce a subcomponent of the system and downstream teams that need it. Each team decides on its own operations according to this bilateral coordination and information sharing. From all bilateral coordination and decisions together thus emerges the responsiveness, resilience, and cost effectiveness of the overall supply chain. Three complementary work packages together aim to improve this global supply chain performance via concrete improvements to the local planning and coordination process: 1. Coordinated production planning in high-tech supply chains aims to improve the production planning and forecast sharing capabilities of individual actors. Planning models in WP1 are local. To ensure improvement of the global supply chain we complement it with 2. An agent-based model for high-tech supply chains, which develops an accurate and detailed descriptive model of the entire supply chain for understanding and explaining the connection between local decisions and global performance. 3. Emergent behavior and resilience in stochastic processing networks: Practitioners prefer easy-to-understand analytical rules for production planning and capacity allocation that perform well on supply chain level. Using probabilistic scaling techniques, this WP develops such rules based on an abstraction of the detailed supply chain models.

Accelerating ramifications of climate change cannot be addressed via conventional adaptation. New climate realities make transformational adaptation unavoidable, but societies prefer to develop in incremental steps. This project looks at past transformations following disasters, and develops computational models to understand social tipping points and better inform climate adaptation policy assessments.

A sustainable future hinges on innovative ideas, new methods and techniques. Physical experimentation environments such as Living Labs, enable involved actors to test and showcase their sustainable innovations, not only on campus but also in local neighborhoods. In this project, four universities, two applied science universities, and a multiregional vocational education institute are working together with partners to discern why certain innovations and lessons succeed while others fail. Utilizing these insights, they collaboratively develop new methods, techniques, and training programs for the next generation of change-makers.

Infrastructure managers face challenges by having to innovate and replace their ageing assets to facilitate new societal requirements and changing use(rs) taking into account cross-infrastructural requirements for design as well as efficient operations and maintenance. This research proposal seeks to develop guidelines and an asset management framework to manage responsive innovation for next generation infrastructure assets. The guidelines will help overcome limitations in the plan- or design stages of replacement projects that have a negative impact on operations and maintenance of interconnected infrastructures. They focus on efforts and tools infrastructure managers develop and employ to address these issues. The framework supports infrastructure managers to identify key issues in maintenance and operation and facilitate coordination, synchronization or even joint development of specific cross infrastructural (asset management) solutions in innovative replacement projects. The need to study and analyse cross-infrastructural collaboration increases as infrastructure replacements increasingly influence interconnected infrastructures and their management. This research analyses innovative cross-infrastructural replacement processes and explores lessons about how responsive innovations incorporate asset management interests and contributes to the develop of solutions. A PhD will participate in a community-of-practice (CoP) where practitioners from ongoing innovative cross-infrastructural replacement projects meet to analyse these collaborations and together identify a set of guidelines that could be used by infrastructure managers to employ future cross-infrastructural replacements. A postdoc simultaneously participates in the CoP and develops a framework that includes new and existing maintenance, design and decision support tools to safeguard cross-infrastructural asset management interests in innovative replacement projects.