In this research the influence of induced stress with a virtual reality (VR) game on moral dilemmas was investigated. VR is a topic that is becoming more and more researched, but studies about the induction of stress and the effects are scarce. By placing participants in a VR environment, where they have to defuse a bomb with the help of another participant, the influence could be analysed. A test group was selected which would perform relaxation exercises after the VR game to relax them. Afterwards, they filled in a survey which measured their stress/anxiety level and gave them social dilemmas to answer. During the whole experiment, participants wore wristbands that measured their biometric data to see if there were any physical signs of stress.

From the data it was confirmed that the VR induced stress in the participants. The data for heart rate, electrodermal activity, and heart rate variability showed an increase in stress level during the VR; Temperature did not show a difference. From the linear regression analysis done, no significant influence of stress on responses to moral dilemmas and a significant influence of personality type was confirmed.

The possibilities of VR in the field of psychology has the potential to improve research regarding stress. VR can be used as a coping method but also as a stress inducing activity. Future research should focus on discovering new possibilities for VR to be used. By improving the research about stress, an improvement of our lifes will follow.

The overwhelming majority of doctor visits are related to stress. When stress is studied the data is often not disaggregated based on gender, creating a gender data gap. Literature about mHealth apps with data analysis being disaggregated based on gender does not exist. In order to amend that, an experiment has been created where the perceived stress of participants is measured in the pre­test, followed by a manipulation video that presents stress as debilitating or enhancing in nature. A post­test measures the perceived stress again, collects demographics as well as life satisfaction, self­-control, and grit. Participants that joined via mHealth app Brainjam had their HRV measured as well. Manipulation videos have been found to be ineffective and were removed from data analysis. One statistically sig­nificant result depended on gender has been found. The duration of the experiment was affected by the perceived level of stress men reported, however, no significant difference was found in women.

Enhancing women’s negotiation performance has shown to be a complex task as existing stereotypes diminish the effectiveness of traditional negotiation strategies and traditional means for negotiation training lack accessibility and scalability. To target these issues, this research investigates to what extent Negotiation Support Systems (NSS) can be leveraged to teach Strategic Empathy - a recently introduced negotiation strategy - to women and whether this can improve their negotiation performance. In specific, the effect of teaching Strategic Empathy by means of NSS was tested with respect to enhancing women’s main performance barriers: i) low self-efficacy, and ii) a lack of persistence. Based on a literature review, a tutoring system that integrated Strategic Empathy was developed and tested through the online experiment. The findings provided strong evidence on the effectiveness of using a NSS to teach Strategic Empathy. Women revealed significantly higher levels of perspective-taking and their understanding and use of Strategic Empathy was shown to increase over time. Also, a significant positive effect was found of Strategic Empathy on women’s self-efficacy. No significant positive effect was found of Strategic Empathy on persistence. The high cognitive load of the experiment and a lack of intrinsic motivation were suggested as potential causes for this finding.
Overall, this work demonstrates the applicability of using NSS to teach Strategic Empathy and its effectiveness for enhancing women’s self-efficacy in salary negotiations. By doing so, it contributes towards a solution to decrease the gender difference in negotiation performance. Moreover, it provides directions for future research as studies can build further on enhancing the system and experimental design, and deepening the understanding of the relationships between Strategic Empathy, confidence, and persistence.

The increasingly important availability of online services is constantly threatened by malicious software such as botnets. Attackers have gained power through devices that are part of the rising Internet of Things (IoT), mostly through infections caused by Mirai. The botnets created by Mirai are used for the purpose of DDoS attacks, which can take away the availability of an online service. Although Mirai can be detected relatively easily due to its superficial signature, the remediation process of Mirai infected IoT devices runs far from smoothly.
As end-users often do not notice the presence of Mirai and manufacturers lack incentives to invest in better security or support, ISPs like KPN are amongst the few viable actors that could defend against botnets like Mirai. As ISPs are able to link infection feeds to their customers, they are able to send out notifications accompanied by protocols that can resolve Mirai infections when executed properly. Although research exists on the remediation rates, it is not clear what processes take place at end-users homes during the remediation process and what critical points of error exist throughout the phases of the anti-botnet cycle. As the remediation rate of Mirai infections is currently only 60 – 76 percent, it can be worth looking into the remediation processes to see where they could be improved.
The main research question is the following: “What do we learn about how and to what extent Internet Service Providers can improve the remediation process of malware infected Internet of Things devices by monitoring end-users while they are cleaning their Mirai infections?”. To answer this question, we have closely followed 17 Mirai infected end-users over a period of 7 weeks, at the KPN Abuse Desk, after a 1 week pilot phase to test our email notification and think aloud protocol. We have prepared and analyzed all steps from identification of a Mirai infection until successful remediation took place. The lion’s share of this experiment is about a virtual visit; a phone call with an option to upgrade to a video conference, in which infected end-users get advanced support in performing the 5 cleaning steps stated in the protocol they received. As the end-users thought aloud during the calls, we were able to follow them closely and pinpoint arising issues. Using a thematic content analysis, we synthesized the personal stories that end-users shared.
During the 7 week experiment, we saw 37 unique IP addresses infected with Mirai, of which 12 were excluded due to the ISP policy of not providing support during the weekends. Of the 25 remaining IP addresses, 3 could not be notified due to technical issues within KPN, 2 did not pick up the phone after being notified and 3 were not willing to take part in the experiment due to trust issues.
16 out of 17 participants that were responsible for the internet security were male, but their varying household sizes shows that this does not relate to men becoming infected more often. The age of the end-users was normally distributed between 21 and 80 and we found a household size of 1 to 6, excluding 3 small business locations that became victim of Mirai. End-users can often only identify 1 or 2 IoT devices in their network (13 out of 17) and are almost always able to pinpoint the infected device (16 out of 17). Many issues arose during the virtual visits, such as a lack of trust, not willing to spend effort, a lack of support by the manufacturer, or the idea that regular protection measures should have protected against Mirai.
Only 6 out of 17 end-users were able to perform all steps successfully. In most cases end-users failed to change the password of their device or performed a regular reset on their router instead of a factory reset. This caused 3 failing remediation efforts and 5 reinfections during the experiment phase. The remediation process has barriers in each phase that could be addressed. The biggest improvement can be made in the awareness of end-users, which would lead to higher prevention of infections. Prevention would keep the many potential issues in the remediation process from arising altogether.

The Dutch civil engineering sector is facing a large-scale rehabilitation assignment of their civilengineering structures, that consists of complex projects that lead to cost overruns and time delays. As a consequencethereof, the sector as a whole must realise a productivity growth to match the required capacity and complexity.Criteria such as innovation, knowledge dissemination and digitisation have a positive effect on productivity growth.However, barriers such as current rules & regulation, individual interests and short-term competition result incollective action problems. Furthermore, the sector is characterised as a polycentric system that consists of multipleautonomous yet interdependent public and private actors with diverging interest. These aspects the challenges of therehabilitation assignment. Therefore, there is a need for governance and coordination that is able to facilitatecollective action. This article presents a novel conceptual framework of governance and coordination is that is ableto address the challenges of the rehabilitation assignment. More specifically, the framework combines programmemanagement, process management, polycentric systems, hybrid organisational structures and participatory systemsto facilitate collective action.

Today’s increasing complexity, rising interconnectivity and larger systems in engineering require new approaches and methods for effective engineering. This is also the case for the technological installation in infrastructure sector (TII), which designs technical systems for infrastructural civil structures. To assist in engineering, Model Based System Engineering (MBSE) can be implemented that provides more control and linkage by means of modelling. The implementation process for MBSE is limited described in literature, especially for the TII sector. Desk research helped to understand and characterize the challenges of the TII sector. By means of in-depth interviews with Siemens Mobility engineers next, requirements were developed. Based on those requirements a framework for implementation of MBSE was constructed that consists of eight building blocks. An implementation process was constructed that puts the framework blocks in order and adds more information for implementing MBSE. The main component, the actual modelling, is split up into technical and process modelling. The technical modelling is fed by the choices and interactions of the process modelling. In the implementation process described which framework blocks are important at what moment, as well as update characteristics of the eventually MBSE environment. In the end, the MBSE methodology and the designed process with framework blocks seem promising for maintaining control of future engineering projects. It provides structure to for setting up the new engineering methodology for the TII in special.

Baggage handling systems (BHS) are unknown to most people, but play a vital role at airports. A BHS is a system that consists of different subsystems, each with its own functions. It is important to make well-informed decisions about the BHS as early as the conceptual design phase, which is the part of the design where the basic solution, such as system configuration (the type and amount of equipment) and system layout (volume reservation for the system), is selected. The choices made in this phase influences the cost, performance, and reliability of the system. Even though the impact of the choices in the conceptual design phase is high, tools to guide the decisions are lacking. Previous research by Noort (2018) and Vijlbrief (2019) has led to an initial model that automates the conceptual design of a BHS. This initial model still has major limitations which need to be resolved in order to finalize the model. Thus, the goal of this research is to improve the model by increasing both the usability and usefulness of the initial model. The usability has increased by decreasing the run time, writing a manual to motivate the learning of the model, and adding a dashboard to visualize the results. The usefulness has increased by expanding the scope of the model, increasing the model precision by limiting uncertainties, and adding levels of detail to the outcome. Since both facets of the model have been increased, it can be concluded that the adjustments made to the initial model can be seen as improvements. It can therefore be said that the model proposed in this research can be seen as an improved model for the conceptual design of baggage handling systems.

Port call efficiency (PCE) is an important factor in the port choice of shipping lines. This research strives to contribute to the current work on PCE optimization. This is done by applying relative new techniques on port call related data. A combination of process mining (PM) and discrete event simulation (DEVS) is explored, with the Port of Rotterdam as a case study, to determine how they can contribute to identifying and assessing policies that improve port call efficiency. It is concluded that PM can be used as a tool for monitoring a port’s behaviour and spotting bottlenecks, from which port call efficiency policies are derived. Furthermore, it proved to be a useful method for conformance checking the event engine. In order to assess the identified policies, a discrete event simulation model is created, using a model structure, identified through PM. A policy is tested, where all the tugboats in the port work together as one fleet, instead of multiple fleets. From this, it is concluded that this method is successful in assessing scenarios, whose results can be translated back to real-live decision making.