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A rational decision-making under risk is based on two conditions, modeled risk and completed information. However, due to the nature of real estate development, complex, unique and dynamic, it is difficult for developers to obtain relevant historical data and consequently the probability cannot be readily calculated. They have to deal with the unexpected circumstances which change constantly within development process. Fast track construction has received considerable attention with its’ time related benefitover the last decade. By design and construction phase overlapping and work packages overlapping, its time saving feature has placed it as a possible alternative to the traditional more sequential method. But fast track construction often results in unexpected extra cost and does not necessarily lead to shorter project duration. In this research the hybrid cross-impact analysis (CIA) model is developed to assist developers in risk-based decision-making. The aim of the CIA method is to refine the probabilities relating to the occurrence of individual future developments to the point that these probabilities can be used either as the basis for planning or as the basis for developing scenarios that subsequently can be used in planning. The hybrid CIA model integrates the strengths of two major practitioners of the CIA method, INTERAX and BASICS model, which can avoid fatiguing and tedious data collection and generate internally consistent scenarios to identify conditions leading to major changes in fast track construction project. Furthermore, with aid of Monte Carlo simulation the hybrid CIA model can also quick response to dynamic situation changes in real estate development projects.

Quick user guide for Jesew, a computer program for 'Joint Ecological and Socio-economic Evaluation of Water resources development. The program is originally written in Basic (Torno, 1988), but for TU Delft and Unesco-IHE Delft rewritten as a spreadsheet application.

This thesis contains a description of the government policies of the Netherlands and the UK with regard to flood and coastal protection and of three detailed case study analyses used in for research project 'Acceptable Risk Levels for Use in Hydraulic Design', which was carried out by HR Wallingford and was funded by the British Government. The research question of the thesis is: In current practise, it is not very well known what risks for hydraulic structures are accepted, what risks are considered as acceptable, and what influence different parties have on setting acceptable risk levels. In addition little is known about how the three design disciplines (hydraulic, structural and geotechnical) interact. The case study analysis was split into three main sections: 1. Influence of stakeholders on the [mal design] 2. Decisions regarding setting acceptable risk levels during the design process at each stage 3. Acceptable risk issues.

Sanitation, as described by the World Health Organization (WHO), refers to the provisions of facilities and services for safe disposal of human urine and faeces. On the outset of the 21st century, 40% of the world’s inhabitants do not have access to sanitation facilities and still rely on a bucket, a bush or a backstreet for excretion. Technically, all options that are required to deal with the global sanitation problem seem to have been already developed. However, the challenge remains in selection and implementation of technologies in a way that the desirable outcomes would be resulted. Some decision-making support tools have been developed so far to address this problem by assisting the decision-makers in selecting the appropriate technologies. While decision-making is about considering the likelihood of uncertain events, in most of the existing evaluation approaches the complex task of predicting and evaluating probabilities is reduced to simple judgmental operations. Forinstance, evaluation of sanitation options is often performed based on predicting the outcomes that best represent a sanitation system, with no or little regard to the factors that limit the predictive accuracy. This thesis adopts a new evaluation approach by taking into account the real world examples from executed sanitation facilities and develops a probabilistic evaluation framework in which sanitation options are assessed based on the probabilities that specific outcomes occur in practice. Absolute judgments are replaced by probable assessments, as this approach tries to keep its distance from making the uncertain certain. Although there may be a hidden consensus that quantification of occurrence probabilities for various outcomes of sanitation options is not always possible, some quantification methods are developed and presented in this thesis for all the assessment criteria. Moreover, this thesis does not only focus on making the decisions, but also tries to channel the decisions in a way that the negative outcomes of sanitation facilities would be reduced through the measures that could be taken to improve the performance of sanitation options. By applying the probabilistic evaluation approach for decision-making about sanitation facilities in low-income unplanned slum settlement of Nyalenda in Kisumu, Kenya (based on limited available data about this region in literature) it is indicated that while a sanitation option may be known for fulfilling a certain task by definition, through a probabilistic evaluation it may be revealed that the local conditions are not likely to allow the expected outcome to occur in practice and as a result this option would have no priority among other options. The necessity for monitoring and post-evaluation of implemented sanitation projects in order to have sufficient feedback for improvement of future decisions is also highlighted.

Since 2002 Dutch higher education has adopted the Bachelor/Master degree structure. Many universities of applied sciences have since then designed their undergraduate professional bachelor programmes education in terms of majors and minors. Minors offer students the possibility to differentiate their education in such a way that it reflects their personal ambitions and interests. Hardly anything is known concerning which factors influence students’ choices with regards to minors. This study aims to answer the following question: which factors influence the choice of minors of undergraduate students in professional HE? A research project consisting of three interrelated studies was designed to answer this question. The first study used existing literature focusing on choices students make in the field of HE. Research into students’ choices of courses, students’ choices of majors and students’ more general choices with regards to higher education was used to develop a first idea about possible variables influencing choices in higher education. A qualititive survey was then carried out to fine-tune the list of variables with regards to students’ choices of minors. The third study was a quantitative survey informed by the findings of the previous two. The students taking part in the survey all study at six different departments of a large university of applied sciences in the South of the Netherlands. The six departments offer education in the following areas of study: social sciences, health, education, economics & business, science & technology and arts. The study contributes to the general knowledge we have concerning decision making and choices that are made by students in HE in particular.

Financial- and Energy markets have one predominant characteristic in common: A large degree of uncertainty that drives the value of an investment in them. The thesis criticises the poor decision making support for investments into new generation capacity on base of pure cost comparison and NPV evaluations that is still prevalent in academic literature to judge nuclear energy systems. In order to separate investments into nuclear generation capacity from other real or financial investments, a classification into Very Large Industrial Real Investments, VLIRI, has been made. This special type of Giga investments acknowledges a high degree of irreversibility, a fuzzy economic assessment horizon and a long preparation and construction time. Additionally, evaluation of profitability is more complex as revenue streams are highly uncertain with often long lead times to achieve these risky cash flows. Regarding the nuclear fuel cycle there are numerous technical alternatives at all stages during the project lifetime, which create a high degree of optionality to react on this financial risk. The presented cross-disciplinary thesis explores Real Option Modelling as simulation tool to assess nuclear energy systems from a statistical and finance-mathematical point of view. Different numerical examples explain the idea of risk management in volatile energy markets and show why decision makers intuitively defer irreversible investments into new nuclear capacity. Heart of the analytical part of the thesis is the nuclear fuel cycle and the numerous Real Options that arise at its front- and back end. Although there are ambitious goals for the next generation of nuclear energy systems regarding sustainability, life-cycle cost advantages and the level of financial risk, there is little incentive for the generating industry to deviate from the once-through fuel cycle strategy. The thesis claims that a shift from a maximizing mean-rate of return attitude towards optimizing mean-variance behaviour might be a self triggering aspect for a more resource friendly fuel cycle. The thesis recognizes trade-offs between costs and financial risk in the nuclear fuel cycle and seeks to capture uncertain input parameters with geometric Brownian motion. The results are in coherence with current behaviour in nuclear energy markets: as costs for different fuel cycle steps fluctuate unpredictably over time, a delay of the decision on reprocessing and storage of spent nuclear fuel pays off. Diversification of the fuel cycle proves to be an efficient tool for risk management, such that a rational and risk aware investor would behave indifferently but not neglecting on behalf the use of MOX fuel and reprocessing strategies.

Decision making in design is of great importance, resulting in success or failure of a system. This paper describes a robust decision support tool for engineering design process, which can be used throughout the design process. The tool is graphical and designed to communicate efficiently with different fields of expertise. It takes into account the Gaussian form of expert lack of certainty and generates the concept or model uncertainty which is necessary for a robust design.

Logistics has become a field of growing interest for public policy making over recent decades. Logistics has a great impact on society. Due to these societal impacts there is a need for a more explicit intervention by governmental policies. This development demonstrates that the growing importance of transition and innovation in logistic concepts is shifting away from the traditional boundaries of these concepts. Logistics concepts nowadays have to serve multiple values (social, economic, environmental) related to the multiple interests of an increasing number of stakeholders. This introduces a challenge for the methodologies/analytical approaches, used to support multiple actor decision-making on new logistics concepts. This study is triggered by the observation that analytical approaches for design and evaluation do not sufficiently match the requirements of societal involvement in logistics. Our research has provided evidence that the involvement of public actors in logistics concepts has a serious influence on the development of new logistics concepts. In theory we found that analytical approaches for design and evaluation do not sufficiently match the requirements of societal involvement of public actors in logistics. Also in practice this lack of methodological innovation frequently results in frictions between policy makers working at different policy levels and the operating field of logistics companies. Based on our case research we have been able to develop an approach to support multiple actor decision making on new logistics concepts. The approach enables the stakeholders involved to make a choice in favour of a final logistics concept that is better tuned to perceptions and expectations of different stakeholders, is well understood and consequently can rely on sufficient support for successful implementation.

Violation of safety procedures by operators is an important cause of accidents. To prevent violations effectively a thorough understanding of the operators' decision making process is required. This research proposes a method to create a personal model that predicts the action the operator would take based on the state of the system. We strive to create a model that reproduces as many operator actions as possible. Decision data used for this research has been collected during experiments in which nine subjects operated the NewTranspall microworld. In developing the model, first the researcher defines the likely decision criteria (i.e. in this research safety, productivity and workload based on prior research). Next, expert subjects are asked to rank screenshots of situations according to the criteria during an interview. Their explanations for this ranking reveal the key parameters that define the decision criteria on which they base decisions. The developed model valuates all possible actions at the system state when the operator took an action; the criteria values are calculated using the key parameters. The model then combines the criteria values using multi-criteria utility theory to form a preference value for each possible action. The highest preferred action is the predicted action. The models are then fitted to the decision data to maximise the amount of correct predictions. It is concluded that the method is successful in a relatively simple NewTranspall environment. A subject's cognitive map visualises the subject's preference, allowing for easier insight into their decision making.

Decision making in manufacturing activities is an everyday business. Manufacturing activities involve the interaction of different actors (i.e. departments) to provide information or activities that will serve as an input for decision making. The situation of dependency, network and cooperation in these activities calls in to question the suitability of today´s decision making processes, which more than enough do not actively and effectively include the several involved actors. A framework of a decision making process based on a multi-actor analysis approach was created and tested in manufacturing companies. This framework process proved with quicker and more effective decisions and suggests to have the potential to have great added value and more benefits to the companies using it. The thesis suggests that indeed, including the involved and affected actors at all stages of decision making, increases the chances to have succesful decisions and improves the support and better implementation of those decisions. The framework can be improved in several areas, most notably, by more empirical tests and research in different manufacturing companies among different regions.

This thesis explores the decision making process about the implementation of a new train safety system at ProRail. ProRail is responsible for the entire rail infrastructure of the Netherlands and faces tasks such as maintaining, optimising and replacing the infrastructure. One of ProRail’s current projects concerns aged train safety systems and they must be replaced before 2018, because the economic and technical life-cycle will come to an end. A general choice between two families of train safety systems has to be established. In addition, reliability and safety may diminish if the aged train safety systems are not replaced on time. One of ProRail’s incentives is to maintain maximum availability and safety of the railway infrastructure for transport companies, therefore this project can be considered as a very important project. The endurance of the decision making process constitutes ten years and is still ongoing. Therefore, we are intrigued to find out why the endurance of this process is relatively long and what factors contribute towards this issue, this research will help to answer this challenging question. To answer this explorative research question, two rounds of interviews were performed. The first round of semi-structured pre-interviews included three participants at various hierarchical levels. These pre-interviews were conducted to acquire background information about the decision making process. With the help of ‘discourse analysis’ most important features influencing the decision making process were found. The second round of semi-structured interviews is an extension of the first round of pre-interviews. In that case seventeen interviews were performed of all functional groups and hierarchical levels within ProRail that are involved in the decision making process. This round focused upon the factors that were gained during the first round of pre-interviews. Again discourse analysis was used as an analytical tool in order to establish key-points that have an effect upon the decision making process. Furthermore, a comprehensive literature study was conducted about five theories, namely principal-agent theory, contingency theory, resource dependency theory, transaction cost economics and social network theory. These theories were used in order to give meaning towards the results. This exploratory study adds perspective towards the decision making process at ProRail. The results from discourse analysis ascertained that organisational structure, communication, group decision making, inconsistency and culture influence the speed of the decision making process. It is worth mentioning that these key-points have a reinforcing effect upon one another. Furthermore, culture can be regarded as an independent variable influencing the decision making process. This explorative study adds new and improved perspectives on scientific and managerial aspects. Still, this study also bears with some limitations. Due to the small sample size, the most likely categories influencing the decision making process are far from generalization. Another important note, the study did not analyse external parties that are involved in the decision making process. However, the explorative nature of this study does supply a first large building block on this topic, which will have an informative character towards ProRail.

Knowingly taking risk is essential to the success of the real estate development business. Investing in real estate development projects, which are characterised by complexity and uncertainty, implies that high risks are taken. Interestingly, little is known about how real estate development organisations have incorporated the skills and procedures necessary to deal successfully with the risky nature of the business. This thesis offers insight into the investment decision making process of three prominent Dutch real estate development companies. The result is an explanatory framework that demonstrates that making good investment decisions is not restricted to analysing risks to support the justification of decisions, but it is also necessary to address decision problems in time, and to ensure that someone is accountable for the decision. The framework offers an innovative perspective on risk management and decision making. Additionally, the thesis presents management practices used to ensure that risks are taken knowingly. These practices are of relevance to senior management of real estate development organisations to design and improve its own decision making procedures.

Description of a simulation game to study and simulate decision making in a port and harbour environment with both social as well as environmental problems. The simulation game has been developed for a course for Black Sea port managers.

Introductory lecture on policy analysis and decision making, with a focus on decision makers in ports and harbours.

Innovation and design literature have given limited consideration to the strategic role of design consultancies in the innovation processes of their clients. A plausible explanation is the difficulty to assess the quality of design consultancies’ output, given the intangibility of the output itself and the difficulty of connecting a knowledge-intensive output to clients’ performance indicators. In this paper we examine design consultancies’ impact on their clients’ strategic decision-making as a way of capturing design consultancies’ strategic role in their clients’ innovation efforts. Design consultancies can influence strategic decisions by enhancing three strategic decision-making mechanisms identified by the literature – rationality, intuition, and political behaviour. By examining the Dutch design consultancy industry, we find initial evidence of design consultancies’ capability of affecting clients’ strategic decision-making. Early involvement in problem definition and long term relationships with clients strengthen design consultancies’ influence.