Game-like Characteristic of Engineering Design

Engineering design is conventionally regarded as a mono actor optimization problem and modeled accordingly. Decision making, values and optimality are building blocks of conventional engineering design. However with the advent of decentralized decision making processes, various actors are more likely to be involved in decision making processes...

The Influence of Scale Preferences on the Design of a Water Innovation: A Case in Dutch River Management

The debate on scale use in river management focuses primarily on the (lack of) fit between the biogeophysical and institutional systems. However, in this article we focus on the ‘subjective’ aspect of scale preferences in water governance. We apply an adapted version of the Integrated Scale Hierarchy for Rivers to determine the degree of fit...

Three challenges, four pitfalls and five actions when teaching conceptual modelling

Modelling is of substantial use in policy analysis. Since policy analysis tries to facilitate decision making of complex multi-actor problems under uncertain circumstances, it needs to rationalize and simplify reality. This is the major challenge of doing policy analysis and especially modelling. The model as an abstract representation of the...