The integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in engineering presents both opportunities and challenges, particularly in complex, safety-critical systems. This thesis explores two key aspects: (1) developing an AI-powered reverse engineering tool for Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) applications and (2) designing a communication framework to enhance interdisciplinary collaboration in AI-driven projects. The aerospace engineering component introduces the REProcess tool, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract structured process representations from KBE applications, improving traceability and automation. The science communication component investigates collaboration barriers between AI experts and domain specialists, leading to the development of a structured ideation matrix for GenAI-powered automation systems. Together, these contributions demonstrate how Explainable AI principles can facilitate the adoption of GenAI in engineering workflows while bridging communication gaps. This interdisciplinary approach provides practical methodologies to enhance AI-driven engineering processes, ensuring both technical feasibility and effective human-AI collaboration.

Biodesign plays a critical role in developing innovative solutions, such as carbon capturing with living materials that incorporate photosynthetic organisms. Team effectiveness is a crucial aspect of successful collaboration and has been extensively studied in various fields. However, research on team effectiveness in the emerging field of Biodesign remains limited. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the impact of transdisciplinary collaboration on team effectiveness and proposing strategies for its enhancement in the future.
In scientific teams, factors such as individual expertise, disciplinary composition, and social dynamics significantly influence team effectiveness. Issues related to team leadership, coordination, and communication have been identified as major contributors to problems in many industries.
This study focuses on exploring how the convergence of different scientific backgrounds and individual perspectives within transdisciplinary Biodesign teams influences team effectiveness. By gaining valuable insights into the dynamics at play, this research aims to lay the foundation for the development of a tool that can enhance team effectiveness across Biodesign projects.
To address the research objective, several sub-questions are proposed. The first sub-question explores themes such as team processes, social networks, hierarchy, disciplinarity, and participatory design that impact team effectiveness in scientific teams. A comprehensive literature study will shed light on this sub-question. The second sub-question investigates the specific themes that affect overall team effectiveness in the Biodesign field. An exploratory case study, involving six expert interviews, will provide insights into this sub-question. Finally, the third sub-question explores the potential of leveraging these identified themes to enhance the team effectiveness of a Biodesign research group. This sub-question will be answered by connecting the findings from the literature study to the data obtained from the case study.
In the final phase of this thesis, a tool called the Dual Feedback System (DFS) was developed with the purpose of enhancing team effectiveness in Biodesign and other academic teams. DFS comprises two components: the Satisfaction Survey and the Feedback Meeting. It involves BEP, MEP, or PhD students and their supervisors who complete the survey to provide feedback on different aspects of the ongoing project, including project satisfaction, teamwork, and supervision. The survey results serve as the foundation for the subsequent Feedback Meeting, which aims to facilitate open communication and bridge the existing hierarchical gap between participants, fostering a collaborative and constructive environment.
Overall, this thesis contributes to our understanding of team effectiveness in the Biodesign field and provides valuable insights in how collaborations can be improved and team effectiveness in transdisciplinary research teams can be enhanced. The findings serve as the basis for the development of DFS, designed to enhance team effectiveness in Biodesign and other academic teams. The implementation of this tool within teams at TU Delft will further amplify its impact, particularly in important areas such as sustainability.

Academic research is inherently cooperative, with researchers exchanging information through formal publications as well as direct messaging. Academia are, however, becoming increasingly competitive: limited financial resources and research spots, among other things, may now affect how researchers cooperate and interact in general. In the current study, the congruence of cooperative and competitive interactions in academia was investigated. To this end, the existing knowledge on the competition and cooperation amalgamation "coopetition", coined for industry relationships, was used. A theoretical framework on coopetition and related theories relavant to academic relationships was constructed. This framework was used to conduct an online survey on academic coopetition among academic microscopy researchers in the Netherlands. The results suggested that competition and cooperation in academia are related yet separate, so that an increase in one does not necessitate a decrease in the other and vice versa. Additionally, the survey responses suggested a discrepancy between the respondents' reported competitive sentiments and those apparent from their other answers. To address this discrepancy, and help academic researchers reflect on what competition and cooperation mean to them, the interactive Guide for Introspection on Competition and Cooperation (GICCo) was developed.

The operating rooms (OR) in hospitals is a complex system, with a high number of innovations every year. Therefore the healthcare professionals (HCPs) are required to choose between the several aspects and innovations for the OR. Decision-making requires a mutual vision (Littlejohn et al., 2017) and should be based on evidence (Turner et al., 2017). To improve the well-informed decision-making, the main research question is: “How can a decision-support tool for optimisation in the operating room help a healthcare professional to select the objectives and the assessment criteria for performance optimisation of the operating room and the optimisation impact?”.

The evidence for the tool consists of the 223 relations between the objectives and the assessment criteria (metrics) and 253 causalities of metrics that express the impact. There is a high heterogeneous perspective on the objectives of the optimisation of the performance of the OR and the criteria of assessing the quantification of (the optimisation of) the OR performance, which makes it harder to create a mutual vision on the OR performance. To achieve a mutual vision, a holistic view and consider all the perspectives, including the impact of optimisations, the HCPs should all share their perspectives on the objectives and the situation should be considered in its whole (Leinonen et al., 2008; Littlejohn et al., 2017). Therefore, the decision-making process could benefit of a decision-support tool.

In this study a new tool is developed, namely the Performance Operating Room Counselling (PORC-)tool. This tool provides a holistic view of the OR performance (optimisation), by displaying evidence of the relations between objectives and metrics and the causalities. It also supports a conversation, which could lead to a mutual vision (Littlejohn et al., 2017). The tool is based on the concepts flowchart, matrix table and Microsoft Excel, for respectively the roadmap, the information display and the running-programme. The PORC-tool consists of an Excel file, a brochure and a manual with a more elaborated version of the functionality and the steps. The PORC-tool provides a clear and structural overview with evidence, to gather information more easily, provides multiple perspectives on the OR performance and supports to gather more insight into the OR organisation and goals before the decision-making of the HCP. The PORC-tool should be validated in practice and the functionality should be approved by HCPs. In the future, the tool can also be extended on perspectives, field of interest, aesthetics and functionality. To conclude, the answer to the main research question is that the HCPs should be facilitated to consider the whole complex system in their decision-making process, and support the decision-making based on evidence and with a mutual vision.

Throughout the work, the goal was to develop the physical layer of a quantum network stack. The layer of the network stack connected to the physical layer is the link layer. For entanglement-based quantum networks, we demonstrated the successful operation of a link layer and a physical layer. The physical layer’s entanglement generation procedure—implemented here using two NV center-based quantum network nodes—is abstracted by the link layer into a robust platform-independent service that can be utilized to run quantum networking applications. Other quantum network platforms using the approaches provided here (which are not unique to our diamond devices) will accelerate the development of large-scale and heterogeneous quantum networks.

----------------

A vision is developed on how successful university-industry collaborations can be established in the field of quantum technology development. By looking at the stakeholders, purpose and type of collaboration, and influencing factors, a three-step model is developed to move from awareness to acceptance to collaboration. By overcoming the existing barriers, university-industry collaborations can be successfully realized.

Personalised medicine represents an increasingly used practice using a patient’s biology to guide their treatment. The implementation of personalised medicine possibly increases the quality of health care and life of the patient by minimising side effects and increasing effectiveness. Personalising medicine can be implemented through a platform which facilitates model-informed precision dosing (MIPD), including various models describing the pharmacokinetics of a specific drug. To make MIPD become clinical practice, wider interdisciplinary collaborations, for example, between pharmacometricians and pharmacists should be studied to learn about their communication and collaboration when using a MIPD platform, and to generate data evaluating the cost–benefit of MIPD in healthcare to motivate professionals to use a MIPD platform. Barriers to implementing these MIPD platforms into clinical practice are not thoroughly studied. However, the functionalities of the MIPD platform should align with the needs of the practitioners as they have to base their dosing regimen on that MIPD platform. As an exemplar for identifying barriers and facilitators of MIPD and corresponding MIPD platforms, this study focuses on the alkylating agent busulfan. Busulfan was chosen because it has a narrow therapeutic index, which often necessitates dosing to a target plasma exposure, while the use of MIPD is beneficial compared to the current clinical practice. Thus, busulfan dosing highlights the importance of using MIPD to improve patient outcomes. Identifying the barriers and facilitators of the MIPD platform, and the interdisciplinary collaboration between pharmacists and pharmacometricians will hopefully give insight on how to stimulate their collaboration and the use of MIPD. This research, therefore, aimed to explore and describe 1) the obstacles in the interdisciplinary collaboration between pharmacists and pharmacometricians, 2) why MIPD platforms are not widely used in clinical practice and what practitioners would need to implement these platforms, and 3) what pharmacists and pharmacometricians need to establish an effective interdisciplinary collaboration using a MIPD platform and thereby create a learning environment. Through conducting a literature research and interviews, collaboration and technology acceptance aspects were studied more in-depth to define the problem and subsequently explore ideas to address this problem. Both disciplines perceived building a connection and keeping their own expertise as important in their collaboration. They also needed their roles in the collaboration and the MIPD platform to be clear in terms of knowing what to expect from the other and how to handle the MIPD platform. Because of these perceptions and needs, we proposed two ways to improve the collaboration and the MIPD platform to subsequently contribute to establishing a learning environment through the MIPD platform. Those two implementations are: 1) the implementation of an introductory course where the disciplines collaborate through the introduction, and 2) tailoring the MIPD platform into two discipline-specific portals, which are based on their skills and tasks. The implementations were tested in interaction through conducting a focus group where pharmacists and pharmacometricians were asked to rank codes retrieved from the interviews on their relevance based on hypothetical scenarios, representing real-world cases. Pharmacists and pharmacometricians perceived connection and trust as important aspects of their collaboration and did expect these to be sufficiently stimulated through the implementation of the introductory course. Regarding the MIPD platform, they perceived the efficiency, in terms of easiness and time-effectiveness in use, as its most important aspect. Thus, efficiency should be ensured in the development of the MIPD platform. To adopt the MIPD platform, it should cover a lot of different patients highlighting the extensive research necessary when building the models within the MIPD platform. To stimulate the implementation of MIPD platforms and the collaboration between pharmacists and pharmacometricians using the MIPD platform, further research should focus on introductory MIPD courses,the MIPD platform design, and including other disciplines in the collaborations around MIPD and MIPD platforms.

Sometimes seaport capacity is a bottleneck during disaster relief operations. This research investigates a flexible, floating and modular seaport. This seaport is stored all around the world and when necessary it ships seaport handling capacity from those storage facilities to the disaster area in order to help with the disaster relief effort. After usage of a mathematical optimization model and the determination of several possible future disaster scenarios we propose that an applicable logistical design of this seaport stores 1,950 TEU/h of handling capacity of this flexible seaport at Kuala Lumpur and 812 TEU/h at Algiers. Next to the logistics contribution the way in which the possible usage of such a seaport influences the communication process of actors involved in a disaster relief effort is studied. We propose that the collaborative sensemaking in disasters is the object of interest. With the help of an emergency simulation role playing game experiment it is concluded that the usage of the seaport leads to, among other things; more equally distributed participation, quicker start of sharing of information, increased awareness of the role of others and more agreement on the common goal. The hypothesis is that this is because of an increased complexity. Integrating this complexity with the logistical applicable design leads to storing a smaller amount of seaport handling capacity at a lot of facilities. This results in a design of opening facilities in Kuala Lumpur (with 1350 TEU/h stored), Algiers (with 356 TEU/h stored), Dakar (with 57 TEU/h stored), Maputo (with 279 TEU/h stored), Berbara (with 35 TEU/h stored) and Corinto (with 332 TEU/h stored).

Like many cities in sub-Saharan Africa, Kumasi, Ghana is facing greater groundwater demands in part due to rapid urbanization. However, currently Ghana does not systematically monitor groundwater, which poses a challenge in management and implementation of science-based policy. Additionally, coordination among stakeholders in Ghana’s water sector has been described as inadequate by the National Water Policy which results in greater obstacles in water resource management. In order to simultaneously address these issues, value sensitive design is implemented to synergize diverse stakeholder perspectives to develop groundwater management and monitoring strategies. Value sensitive design provides a theoretical basis for explicitly incorporating values into innovations. In order to address the goal of the study, 46 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders in the Kumasi water sector were conducted as well as literature and policy reviews.
The first research question aims to identify key stakeholders and their role in groundwater management. The results identifed over 40 stakeholder groups in the Kumasi water sector. However, the most well-known groups are Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) and the Water Resources Commission (WRC). In addition to these government organizations, technical experts, specifically affiliated with Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), were cited as necessary to involve in the development of a groundwater monitoring technology.
The second research question seeks to identify practical considerations for groundwater monitoring. Here, there was a general negative view of groundwater management with challenges including limited regulation, lack of awareness for groundwater issues, and limited collaboration among groundwater stakeholders. To address these challenges, the most cited design requirement mentioned during the interviews was the need for mass education on water related concerns. Lastly, there were significant concerns among many of the interviewees about borehole drilling and the importance of informal communication between drillers and neighbors to ensure safe and sustainable access to groundwater.
The third research question uses value sensitive design protocols to create value profiles for each of the stakeholder groups. The values incorporated in this study are economic efficiency, environmental sustainability, safety, social equity, participation, reliability, and trust. Respondents were asked, through a token allocation activity, to indicate what values are important for groundwater monitoring. Although the value profiles between stakeholder groups were not statistically different, the anecdotal evidence from interviews suggests that participation is connected to other values. This indicates that participation contributes to achieving other values in the implementation of a groundwater monitoring program.
The last research question sought to identify communication tools to incorporate considerations derived from the research questions, case studies, Ghanaian water policy, and a theoretical framework based on participatory design. This resulted in the recommendation of three parallel strategies: a) multi-stakeholder involvement, b) technology development and c) a water education campaign. The programs are designed to operate in a cyclic manner based on a social learning model specific to water management. This will enable a groundwater monitoring technology to be developed (b) alongside a water education campaign (c) in the community where water will be monitored. Implementation of a multistakeholder advisory board to coordinate these efforts and facilitate collaboration will ensure a participatory process. The next steps are to disseminate findings to key stakeholders in the Ghana water sector and continuously adapt the action plans as new information is identified.

Our housing market is challenged. Housing prices are rising, and the number of single-person households is increasing, which impacts the affordability of housing. Cohousing offers a possible solution to this problem. However, the level of empowerment of cohousing communities to self-organize is troubled by financial or legal barriers, among other things. Self-organization is defined as: initiatives that emerge spontaneously in civil society from autonomous community-based networks of citizens, who are part of the urban system but independent of government procedures, and that are created around a common intrinsic motivation. The concept of sharing economy might provide a solution for the current barriers to cohousing development. Sharing economy is defined as: collaborative consumption of under-utilized goods, enabled through access rather than ownership, often through the use of community-based online services. This research connects sharing economy to cohousing by looking at empowerment of self-organization of cohousing initiatives. Sharing economy and self-organization of cohousing communities are connected because both are community-based initiatives, which are built upon a common motivation, and both are not facilitated by political power. The following research question was answered by studying a cohousing initiative: How can the concept of sharing economy support empowerment of cohousing communities towards self-organization to create affordable homes? This study researches empowerment by researching the community’s social capital, research shows that social capital contributes to community empowerment. Research findings show that the studied cohousing project can be viewed as a sharing economy. This leads to both advantages and disadvantages for the community. Moreover, the project struggles with its self-organization and is largely dependent on the housing corporation. Lastly, the cohousing project possesses social capital, but some elements can be improved. Moreover, the research found that the sharing economy within the cohousing initiative can support some conditions for self-organization, as well as bonding social capital. However, the aforementioned disadvantages of the case study’s sharing economy may limit the benefits. To reduce the disadvantages of sharing economy, this study proposes a communication tool as a possible solution for improving communication in the studied cohousing project. The tool, called ‘(im)Perfection Puzzle’, uses geometric shapes to help residents explain their thoughts and ideas regarding a specific problem and as a result work towards the acceptance of the differences in everyone’s ideas. A test of the tool illustrated that the tool has potential, but future research is recommended as long term effects remain unclear. Also, research with other cohousing projects is recommended for validating the connection between sharing economy and self-organization, and sharing economy and social capital.

The goal of this graduation project, conducted for the master science communication at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), was to design a tool to help partners of diabetes type 1 patients to come closer to the patient, by conversations about diabetes, to gain more insights in how the patients feels and how to support. The project is part of the Integrated Care Program for Diabetes type 1 patients (INCAP) in which ultiple partners are involved (SERMAS, Medtronic, Universidad Politécnica Madrid, TU Delft).

Algorithms are all around us. Based on large amounts of data and through automated decision-making processes, they increasingly exercise power over us. As a way of governing this power, we should be able to hold these algorithms and those responsible for implementing them accountable. This research posed the following research question: How can algorithmic accountability be implemented by design?

A literature review of the theory related to algorithmic accountability was executed, which led to a framework of five aspects that are required for achieving it: responsibility, explainability, debatability, auditability and sanctionability. Within a design case study, the implementation of these five aspects was investigated.

Based on the insights from research and design activities in this research, I conclude that the following guidelines will structure the process of designing accountability mechanisms:

(1) Understand the context in which the algorithm is created and employed;
(2) anticipate unwanted developments or effects of the system;
(3) design context-specific accountability mechanisms based on these findings.

Background: There is an increasing need for structured methods that encourage effective knowledge sharing and collaborations at the working floor to implement innovation strategies, especially in case of employer - employee relationships.

Objective: This research (master thesis) focused on knowledge sharing on the work floor during interprofessional collaborations to achieve durable innovation in hierarchical organisations using Communities of Practice. An integrative practical and theoretical study has been conducted.

Research results: Communities of Practice managers can facilitate knowledge sharing in hierarchical organisations by actively fulfilling the connecting role between the innovation strategy managers and the executive professionals at the working floor. The COP managers can facilitate knowledge sharing by integrating the three levels (strategic, tactical and operational) using the Community Builder Program. Therefore, three steps need to be taken: 1) Develop close connections between the innovation strategists and themselves to align the organisation’s innovation strategy with their communities of practices’ raison d’être. 2) Design a COP strategy (using the Collaboration Analyser) aligned with the innovation strategy and simultaneously should all COP managers’ personal perspectives be aligned prior to the execution of the COP strategy. 3) Facilitate knowledge sharing and open communication in the design of the collaboration between COP members and their employers they are working with to share the gathered COP knowledge and put into practice. Use the C-Booster.

Deliverables: The research resulted in three parts: 1) Collaboration Analyser: A conceptual collaboration model that supports in knowledge sharing and helps COP managers to analyse the collaborations between COP members. 2) C-Booster: A tool that facilitates creative and collaborative thinking and open communication during the ‘fuzzy front design stage’ of the collaboration between two professionals at the working floor. 3) Community Builder Program: A program that facilitates COP management in the alignment with the innovation strategy with the collaborations at the work floor, using the model and tool.