Disaster resilient Galveston: A multidisciplinary project on the design of sustainable measures to counteract coastal and pluvial flooding issues in Galveston

The report tackles Galveston's flooding challenges, which are currently in development with the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) ring barrier. However, the current design, predominantly addressing coastal flooding, falls short in dealing with pluvial flooding, relying heavily on pumps. This top-down approach neglects environmental and...

ASMITA modelling of the Wadden Sea with focus on the Groningerwad: Assessing how the Groningerwad will respond to accelerated sea level rise

Some of the sediment which is eroded from the Dutch coast ends up in the Wadden Sea. Because of this the morphological development of the Wadden Sea is important, not only for the Wadden Sea itself but also for the maintenance programs of the adjacent coastlines. This is one of the reasons that the morphological development of the Wadden Sea is...

The joint realization of heat transition ambitions: A comparative analysis into the conditions of collaborative governance to facilitate heat transition in two selected Dutch regional case studies

The aim of the thesis investigates and addresses what strategies municipalities can use in relation to collaborative action in a collaborative governance setting to facilitate heat transition at regional scale. The heat transition is a multifaceted problem where fragmentation and a deficient direction role of municipalities is a key...

Learning What to Attend to: Using bisimulation metrics to explore and improve upon what a deep reinforcement learning agent learns

We analyze the internal representations that deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents form of their environments and whether these representations correspond to what such agents should ideally learn. The purpose of this comparison is both a better understanding of why certain algorithms or network architectures perform better than others and the...

City in Balance: a spatial vision and strategy on the continuity between centre and periphery in Amsterdam

Amsterdam is dealing with a discontinuity between a gentrified urban centre and a disadvantaged periphery, caused by the presence of different spatial concepts. The centre follows the concept of centralisation and therefore has fine grain, marked by the richness of connections between the different scaled grids. Centrality happens on the streets...

Decreasing the throughput times of products in an engine overhaul environment

This thesis proposes a solution, consisted of 12 partial solutions, to implement in the workshop of Pon Power in a way that better suits the current system.

Emergency closure of dike breaches: The effect and applicability of emergency measures

Floods cause, even in modern countries, a lot of victims and damage every year. Generally, countries invest in prevention and protection, yet, also emergency response measures could be a (last) option. Regarding the latter, a distinction is made between preventive emergency measures (e.g. sand bags to raise the crest level of a flood defence)...

Culture and Collaboration: The eBerea case

This research has been done to explore the influence of cross-nationality preference in communication and knowledge-transfer on the emergence of collaborations in an academic research network. Hofstede’s cultural dimensions’ Individualism, Long-term orientation and Uncertainty Avoidance are proposed to affect collaboration through participants’...

2D Numerical Analysis of Settlement Damage to Buildings: Including a non-linear Masonry Model and Soil-structure Interface

The increased number of underground infrastructure projects asks for a reliable and efficient assessment of settlement damages to buildings. Currently a three-stage method is in use: the first stage looks into the greenfield deformations, the second stage is a linear elastic 2D method in which greenfield deformations are applied onto a building...

Rainfall fed inundation in greenhouse dominated polders: Research of water system assessments

Since the end of the last century, polders in the Netherlands have suffered from inundation due to heavy rainfall. Inundation occurrences in 1998 have led to large economic losses, especially in polders with a fast rainfall runoff process due to the high percentage of land occupied by greenhouses. This thesis focuses on water system assessments,...

Integraal Plan voor de kust van Katwijk: Ontwikkeling van Veiligheid en Recreatie

In Katwijk zijn er verschillende partijen die plannen hebben met betrekking tot de kust. Veiligheidsverhoging van een deel van Katwijk dat nog niet op deltaniveau is, een vergrootte uitwateringsvoorziening, de geprojecteerde nieuwe zeejachthaven en ontsluiting van het scheepvaartverkeer vanaf zee zijn hierbij de kernwoorden. De projectgroep...