Organizations with large sets of continuously changing assets such as ProRail face the difficulty of keeping their information systems up-to-date with the actual situation in the field. Currently, they rely heavily on people who assess, measure, and photograph the situation outside, and take measures when they encounter discrepancies. This process is expensive and error-prone. The ‘Digital Survey’ project that Systems Engineering has carried out in 2012 for ProRail and RIGD-Loxia assessed the opportunity to use digital technology to increase efficiency, frequency and quality of the survey process. Four digital high-quality cameras were installed on a train, together with other measurement equipment to gather over 1 Tb of data a day about the train tracks and their surroundings. With object recognition and character recognition algorithms, GIS-technology, 2D and 3D reconstruction methods, and specially developed analysis software, the entire information chain from data gathering, through data fusion and data analysis towards data visualisation, was prototyped and analysed. The project concluded that digital surveying is possible and attractive, but that solutions for managing ‘big data’ have to be applied to deal with the vast amounts of information.

Together with the Policy, Organization, Law and Gaming group of TPM, we research serious gaming as a means to support complex decision making for ProRail and its partners. As manager of the 2^nd busiest rail network in the world, ProRail has to develop innovative solutions to increase the capacity of the network, while keeping transportation safe and manageable, also when there are disturbances such as snow, broken trains, technical failures, maintenance, and shutdowns of parts of the network. In a four-year program, technical simulations of the systems operations are combined with serious games to prepare and test innovative solutions. Because of the many aspects that have to be taken into account, multiple simulation models have to be coupled in so-called federations to provide the richness and fidelity for decision making. Systems Engineering researches and develops new solutions for parallel and distributed simulation to enable realistic gaming for testing new solutions to operate and manage the future rail network in The Netherlands.

The Port of Rotterdam plays an important role for the Dutch economy. Large volumes of containerized goods are imported and exported. The vast transportation network that extends into Europe is complex and difficult to plan and control, especially because the call size of the ships is increasing. Ships with more than 14000 twenty-foot containers are expected to use the new container terminals that will open on the 2nd Maasvlakte in 2014. When there are disturbances such as a late arrival of one of these deep-sea carriers, tens of thousands of operations in the transportation chain are affected. The SALOMO research project aims at facilitating better decision making and planning through increased shared situational awareness in the transportation chain, as well as training the staff to flexibly deal with dynamic circumstances. In the project, 8 innovations using simulation and serious gaming are developed and tested to improve shared situational awareness in these complex multi-stakeholder settings. The 4-year project is funded by Dinalog and carried out with the Open University, industry partners and small gaming companies.

SHINE (Sensing Heterogeneous Information Network Environment) is the flagship project of DIRECT (Delft Institute for Research on ICT at Delft University of Technology). It has started on 01-01-2012 and will end on 31-12-2015.

In our modern society, more and more data is becoming available through technological advances like sensor technology, social media and smartphones. This data can concern a wide variety of aspects of our society, for example environment data like air quality, wind direction, temperature and rainfall, or data about cities like traffic density and parking availability. The scientific challenge that we focus on in this project aims at gathering, processing and interpreting this data for answering information needs. More specifically, we address the following research question:

How can heterogeneous resources (people, mobile sensors, fixed sensors, social media, information systems, etc.) self-organize for answering information needs?

Self-organization is thus a central theme in the project. If a system is able to self-organize, this means that structures and patterns emerge without central control. Many systems exhibit characteristics of self-organization, like a flock of birds, Wikipedia, traffic streams and self-organizing teams in human organizations. An important advantage of self-organization is flexibility. Structures and networks can be formed dynamically according to what is needed and available at a particular moment. In this project we will develop techniques that support the formation of such structures and networks among heterogeneous information resources, aimed at answering information needs.

Self-organization should be robust and dynamic. That is, the techniques for self-organization should be able to handle failures, for example sensors that get disconnected or deliver faulty information, and it should be able to respond in a timely and flexible manner to continuously changing information needs. Moreover, it needs to take place across multiple levels ranging from the lowest in which resource coordination takes place to the highest organization coordination level in which the information need is interpreted and an answer is presented. Finally, self-organization is aimed at organizing heterogeneous resources. This gives rise to challenges concerning aggregation and interpretation of information in a reliable manner.

CIPHER is an EU ISEC funded project. The project aims to accomplish an in-depth analysis of the reality of security and trust in privately held information systems at European level before developing a methodological framework which will contain recommendations designed to prevent cyber-crime and to react in case a malicious cyber-attack has been attempted. Finally a global European regulatory and technological roadmap will be advised.

Since we are becoming increasingly interconnected; communications networks affect every aspect of our life while systems capture and make extensive use of personal information. Our digital identity is certainly vulnerable to crime. This crime can result in physical harm, in the damage of infrastructures, in the hurt of confidence in organizations and administrations and in huge economic cost (according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, losses due to cyber-crime in 2008 may have reached as much as 1 trillion US dollars).

As a result, cyber-crime is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges that societies need to tackle. However, the most damaging cyber-attacks experienced up to now have been transnational; this problem has positively become international and cannot be answered locally. On the contrary, harmonized and coordinated policies are required, consequently, cyber-crime has become now a global priority in the EU’s internal security strategy.

This project intends to address this challenge, heeding not only technological aspects, but also incorporating social and ethical concerns related to privately held information systems; policies and regulations at national level on the matter will also be subject of study.

Why reAct?
Motivation has always been one of the key challenges in education. In the XXI century, with so many external sources that attract the attention of students, this challenge becomes increasingly important.
To a greater or lesser extent all students are affected by the dissonance between the official curriculum, which defines what should be taught in the classroom, and their own perceptions and expectations regarding the relevance of what they are taught. The consequences are greater for those for whom this lack of motivation, together with other factors, affects their performance in formal education and their integration into society, with the result that they do not complete compulsory education.

Numerous studies have shown that intrinsic motivation is associated with high educational attainment and enjoyment for students. It is intimately connected with the feeling of personal involvement and commitment to a task, with tasks that the individual finds relevant and meaningful, and with interaction with other people around these tasks. Thus, a person learns best in a social environment, doing something that is significant to him or her.

Ownership and creativity are also key issues. A project will be motivating if the activity is mostly directed in an autonomous way by the actor, it is  creative, and it involves collaboration.

The dynamics of the traditional school and the classroom often militate against these three elements. However, by harnessing the potential of new technologies it may possible to bring new dynamics to the educational process and integrate new elements that will help to change the attitude and motivation of these students toward learning. There are initiatives that appear to indicate this. The aim of reAct is to explore this possibility.

What are the objectives of reAct?

1. A change of attitude. The aim is for the learners to change from being passive subjects, an attitude instilled by the educational system throughout their childhood and youth, to being active. To effect this change we aim to propose that they participate in creative activities, defined and directed by themselves, they are relevant and close to their lives.
2. Open minds. It would help to broaden their perspectives and let them discover other experiences and points of view of people living in other environments. European mobility initiatives have shown the benefits of this kind of activity. This should not be limited to a distant abstract knowledge, it is necessary to promote close relations between people of different backgrounds through joint cooperation.
3. Teach them to learn. This includes developing cognitive skills and critical thinking skills that enable them to cope independently and autonomously with social and labor demands.

What is reAct?
The project will integrate the three key elements we have mentioned: autonomy, creativity and collaboration in a methodology aimed at harnessing the potential of new technologies, in order to:

• carry out creative activities
• facilitate collaboration in collaborative projects, reducing geographical distances and promoting mutual cultural understanding, and reflection
• develop meta-cognitive skills and critical thinking
• This methodology is based on investigation and consolidated processes, taken from informal learning, in which students “discover” by doing what motivates them, and through this process take a number of cognitive skills that allow them to act autonomously, tackling and understanding the learning situations as new opportunities.

http://www.reactproject.eu/

The ultimate goal of BRIDGE is to increase the safety of citizens by developing technical and organisational solutions that significantly improve crisis and emergency management in the EU Member States. A BRIDGE platform will provide technical support for multi-agency collaboration in large-scale emergency relief efforts. The key to this is to ensure interoperability, harmonization and cooperation among stakeholders on the technical and organisational level.

This research project takes as a starting point the necessity for decentralised decision making: that decisions need to be made at the most appropriate level within an organisation, close to the stakeholders involved, near those with the best information. This project’s main objective is to develop models for Societal Governance of Infrastructures, where local communities or possibly individual households have more influence on the regulatory framework of infrastructures. Given that circumstances vary widely with respect to the types of stakeholders, the social interests that are at stake and the level in society in which they occur, we expect to find a need for different governance processes for different issues. However, the distribution company also needs to have a transparent and consistent decision making process, so the analysis will include the question of how to combine these objectives. An important issue in this research is the role of the national government, not only because it is an important stakeholder – the distribution networks will play an important role in the national energy transition – but also because it sets the regulatory constraints within which distribution companies operate. The current regulatory framework has a strong focus on economic efficiency, whereas the social goals are shifting towards innovation needed for the energy transition. Finally, regulation can be used to facilitate forms of societal governance, or may be necessary to guarantee things like minimum service levels.