The practice and opportunities in re-operating dams for the environment

For most of the 20th century, the design and operation of dams prioritized traditional economic considerations such as hydropower generation, flood risk reduction and provision of water for irrigation and domestic use. This resulted in altered river flow regimes, degraded riverine ecosystems and ecosystem services, and biodiversity loss....

Automated testing for self-driving cars using real-world roads

Cyber-physical systems are complex systems constructed from different independent parts. A self-driving car is an example of a cyber-physical system where independent parts have to come together in order to result in a car that is able to drive by itself. The main challenge is finding failures within the interactions between the independent...

Multidisciplinary Design Optimization of Timber High-Rise: Research and Development of a Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Tool

There are two main challenges in the construction industry: carbon emissions and densification in cities. Timber high-rise might prove as a suitable solution to both these challenges. However, there is a lack of implementation of timber high-rise. This research argues that a lack of thorough analysis of timber design alternatives in the...

Good Things Come In Threes: Improving Search-based Crash Reproduction With Helper Objectives

Writing a test case reproducing a reported software crash is a common practice to identify the root cause of an anomaly in the software under test. However, this task is usually labor-intensive and time-taking. Hence, evolutionary intelligence approaches have been successfully applied to assist developers during debugging by generating a test...

Designing a future regional energy system: multi-objective optimization of a regional energy system from a multi-actor perspective

The energy system is undergoing a grand transition. In 2019, the Dutch government presented the national climate accord stating that in 2030, 70% of all energy needs to come from a renewable source. In this accord, strong emphasis is put on a regional approach to the energy transition. Across the country, regions are picking up the gauntlet and...

Robust Decision Support Methods: A Comparative Analysis

Methods for decision support in the context of deep uncertainty have been gaining interest in the context of complex and adaptive problems that are characterized by “tipping point” behaviours. Unlike a traditional “predict-then-act” methods, which determine policies based on specific predictions of future behaviour, these decision support...

An improved MOEA/D algorithm for bi-objective optimization problems with complex Pareto fronts and its application to structural optimization

The multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D) has been recognized as a promising method for solving multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs), receiving a lot of attention from researchers in recent years. However, its performance in handling MOPs with complicated Pareto fronts (PFs) is still limited,...

Convex hull ranking algorithm for multi-objective evolutionary algorithms

Due to many applications of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms in real world optimization problems, several studies have been done to improve these algorithms in recent years. Since most multi-objective evolutionary algorithms are based on the non-dominated principle, and their complexity depends on finding non-dominated fronts, this paper...

Discovering Design Principles for Soft Multi-objective Decision Making

Decision-making tasks sometimes involve soft objectives. They are soft in the sense that they contain uncertainty, imprecision or vagueness. For example, decisions on built environment aim to maximize comfort or other experiential qualities. Pareto-optimal solutions to such problems can be found using multi-objective evolutionary search together...

Intelligent Design Objects (IDO): A cognitive approach for performance-based design

Design is complex. This is because it involves conflicting goals that are often vague. Also, prior to the design it is generally not clear how important goals are relative to each other. And finally the amount of possible solutions is large in general. These bottlenecks are addressed in this thesis. A novel approach for design is proposed, where...