Perspectives on Assessing the Flexibility of Hospitals for Crisis Mode Operations: Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Netherlands

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic placed healthcare design at the heart of the crisis. Hospitals faced challenges such as rapidly increasing their intensive care unit capacity, enabling physical distancing measures, quickly converting to telehealth and telework practices, and above all, keeping patients and staff safe. Improving flexibility...

Pandemic resilience in Dutch hospitals: Flexibility that counts in a crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic placed healthcare design at the heart of the crisis. Hospitals faced challenges such as increasing their ICU capacity and enabling physical-distancing measures to prevent infectious spread. They also needed to co-house suspected COVID patients and nonCOVID patients with different requirements and enforce separate entrances...

Optimal Energy Resource Control in Congested Areas: A Stochastic Resource Dispatch Optimization Model Considering Flexible Robust Constraints

Future energy systems are expected to rely increasingly more on distributed energy resources (DER). Prosumers that own energy resources such as photovoltaic (PV) generation and energy storage systems, will play a crucial role in the realization of DER’s in future power systems. Limited grid connections due to local electricity congestion make it...

Towards a resilient hospital design: Emerging design considerations for future healthcare facilities after the pandemic COVID-19

COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of the healthcare systems in society. The pandemic overwhelmed hospitals and forced rapid and radical changes in healthcare organizations' working practices and management structures (MASS Design Group, 2020; Ramboll, 2021; Capolongo et al., 2020). The virus led to unfamiliar environments, new spatial...

Scheduling under uncertainty: Attaining flexibility, robustness and stability

The research presented in this thesis is part of the Rolling Stock Life Cycle Logistics applied research and development program, conducted by NedTrain. As a company, NedTrain belongs to Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS; the principal railway company in the Netherlands) and provides maintenance services for the NS train-fleet. The aim of this program...

Robust scheduling in an uncertain environment

This thesis presents research on scheduling in an uncertain environment, which forms a part of the rolling stock life cycle logistics applied research and development program funded by Dutch railway industry companies. The focus therefore lies on scheduling of maintenance operations on rolling stock in the railway industry. The first chapter...