Niek Wijngaards

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I work in the area of technology innovation for the past 20+ years, with over 130 publications and participation in national and international R&D projects as well as product development and product innovation. If you are interested to learn how I and my colleagues can assist, then you are invited to contact me.

The passion for my work is implementing practical solutions for enhancing joint problem-solving capabilities of humans and technology, while respecting the autonomy of the participating individuals and/or organisations. My major qualities are: team-player, enthusiasm, creativity, presentation skills, and multi-disciplinary background & affinity. My motto is "Generalising Specialist": "generalising" by acquiring knowledge from new domains and disciplines for 'cross-pollination' purposes, and "specialist" by reinforcing my existing and new expertise through addressing real-world challenges. As a team-player I productively work in cooperation with researchers and other professionals from different domains and organisations, including academic and industrial researchers, operating system developers, (scientific) programmers, psychologists, anthropologists, business developers and legal experts. My creativity is exemplified by my problem-solving skills in different domains. My management style is characterised by my focus on empowering the individual to cooperatively achieve the project goals - as I have shown in the role of technical coordinator in national and international projects.
Supervisors: Frances Brazier and Jan Treur
Phone: +31616332191
Address: near Delft, The Netherlands

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Papers by Niek Wijngaards

The Learning Web: The Instructor's Experience In Concurrent Classroom and Distance Education Sections of a Software Engineering Graduate Course

EdMedia: World Conference on Educational Media and Technology, 1999

To increase learning benefits in a distance graduate course, instructors: 1) need to structure th... more To increase learning benefits in a distance graduate course, instructors: 1) need to structure the entire course prior to start date (which may be less responsive to emerging topics of interest to students), 2) must ensure that course content and web-based instructions are very detailed and explicit, 3) may find that integrating classroom discussions with web-based materials is challenging, 4) have less flexibility for spontaneous inclusions/exclusions of readings, topics, exercises, assignments 5) may find it is difficult to bring local and distance students to a common level of expectations, 6) may find that coursework submissions tend to vary more for distance students, perhaps because subtleties of face-to-face interaction are lost, 7) will find that students acclimatize quickly to using e-mail and list servers, and 8) may find it easier to get shy and/or ESL students to use list servers than it is to get them to discuss topics in class.

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Primitive Interaction Protocols for Agents in a Dynamic Environment

This paper describes a generic multi-agent systems architecture for dynamic collaboration in an o... more This paper describes a generic multi-agent systems architecture for dynamic collaboration in an open environment. This architecture is described as composed of basic role-oriented processes communicating though primitive interaction protocols. The architecture is aimed to provide an enabling communications framework upon which multi-agent system (MAS) models can be organized and built. In particular, we plan to use this architecture in future research as an experimental test bed on which to study the suitability of human, face-to-face interaction factors-as described in the social sciences-as guidelines for analyzing and improving the interaction abilities of software agents.

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The Comparative Evaluation of Classroom and Distance Sections of a Industrial Software Engineering Graduate Course

International Conference on Mathematics / Science Education and Technology, 1999

Abstract: This paper describes the extent to which we achieved our original objectives with a dis... more

Distributed Wisdom - Are You in Control of Your Own Computer?

IEEE Distributed Systems Online, 2003

Actor-agent team experimentation in the context of incident management

ISCRAM, 2010

The collaboration between humans (actors) and artificial entities (agents) can be a potential per... more The collaboration between humans (actors) and artificial entities (agents) can be a potential performance boost. Agents, as complementary artificial intelligent entities, can alleviate actors from certain activities, while enlarging the collective effectiveness. This paper describes our approach for experimentation with actors, agents and their interaction. This approach is based on a principled combination of existing empirical research methods and is illustrated by a small experiment which assesses the performance of a specific actor-agent team in comparison with an actor-only team in an incident management context. The REsearch and Simulation toolKit (RESK) is instrumental for controlled and repeatable experimentation. The indicative findings show that the approach is viable and forms a basis for further data collection and comparative experiments. The approach supports applied actoragent research to show its (dis)advantages as compared to actor-only solutions.

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Real-time train driver rescheduling by actor-agent techniques

Public Transport, Aug 1, 2010

Passenger railway operations are based on an extensive planning process for generating the timeta... more Passenger railway operations are based on an extensive planning process for generating the timetable, the rolling stock circulation, and the crew duties for train drivers and conductors. In particular, crew scheduling is a complex process. After the planning process has been completed, the plans are carried out in the real-time operations. Preferably, the plans are carried out as scheduled. However, in case of delays of trains or large disruptions of the railway system, the timetable, the rolling stock circulation and the crew duties may not be feasible anymore and must be rescheduled. This paper presents a method based on multi-agent techniques to solve the train driver rescheduling problem in case of a large disruption. It assumes that the timetable and the rolling stock have been rescheduled already based on an incident scenario. In the crew rescheduling model, each train driver is represented by a driver-agent. A driver-agent whose duty has become infeasible by the disruption starts a recursive task exchange process with the other driver-agents in order to solve this infeasibility. The task exchange process is supported by a route-analyzer-agent, which determines whether a proposed task exchange is feasible, conditionally feasible, or not feasible. The task exchange process is guided by several cost parameters, and the aim is to find a feasible set of duties at minimal total cost. The train driver rescheduling method was tested on several realistic disruption instances of Netherlands Railways (NS), the main operator of passenger trains in the

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How cognitive control and load affect goal pursuit in decision making

PsycEXTRA Dataset, 2012

Re-design of compositional systems

Wijngaards, N. J. E. (1999). Re-design of compositional systems. Copyright and moral rights for t... more Wijngaards, N. J. E. (1999). Re-design of compositional systems. Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

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The Learning Web: A Comparison of Learning Environments in Concurrent Classroom and Distance Education Sections of a Software Engineering Graduate Course

Agents in a Federated World

ABSTRACT Any application operating in a distributed environment must be designed to allow for a n... more ABSTRACT Any application operating in a distributed environment must be designed to allow for a number of idiosyncrasies including autonomy, asynchronous processing, and multiple organisational entities. The latter aspect, also known as federation, poses additional challenges such as lacking overall centralised control and/or authorities. In our work at Thales Research &amp; Technology Netherlands (TRT-NL) we investigate this domain and construct our prototypes and demonstrators on a strong foundation in agent technology.

Crisis decision making through a shared integrative negotiation mental model

International Journal of Emergency Management, 2009

Decision making during crises takes place in (multi-agency) teams, in a bureaucratic political co... more Decision making during crises takes place in (multi-agency) teams, in a bureaucratic political context. As a result, the common notion that during crises decision making should be done in line with a Command & Control structure is invalid. This paper shows that the best way for crisis decision making teams in a bureaucratic political context is to follow an integrative negotiation approach as the shared mental model of decision making. This conclusion is based on an analysis of crisis decision making by teams in a bureaucratic political context. First of all this explains why in a bureaucratic political context the Command & Control adage does not hold. Secondly, this paper motivates why crisis decision making in such context can be seen as a negotiation process. Further analysis of the given context shows that an assertive and cooperative approach suits crisis decision making best.

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The hidden dangers of experimenting in distributed AI

Research on multi-agent systems often involves experiments, also in situations where humans inter... more Research on multi-agent systems often involves experiments, also in situations where humans interact with agents. Consequently, the field of experimental (human) sciences becomes more and more relevant. This paper clarifies how things can and often do go wrong in distributed AI experiments. We show the flaws in methodological design in existing papers (both with and without humans) and work out an example involving human test-subjects to introduce the fundamental issues of experimental design. Furthermore, we provide researchers with an approach to improve their experimental design. We wish to stimulate researchers to conduct better experiments -- which will benefit us all.

Goal-Based Explainable Security Certificate Requests

In crisis situations it is important that crisis response workers can quickly get access to the r... more In crisis situations it is important that crisis response workers can quickly get access to the right information for the tasks they are required to undertake. A distinction can be made between getting the right information and having the rights to get that information. The first is an information filtering and relevance problem, the second is a security issue related to access control. In this paper we focus on the second issue. It is impossible to predefine access rules for all players in a crisis situation that ensure that they have access only to the information they need. Therefore the key is to have a system that is flexible and timely (efficient) with respect to the decision to grant access, without a major burden on humans having to make these decisions, and without inadvertant leakages of sensitive information. We believe for crisis management it is more important to be able to hold individuals and organizations accountable for their use of information than to overly restrict access to information. We propose goal-based explainable security certificate requests as a solution to this problem.

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The Borsele files: the challenge of acquiring usable data under chaotic circumstances

International Journal of Emergency Management, 2008

Conducting empirical research involves a balancing act between scientific rigor and real-life pra... more Conducting empirical research involves a balancing act between scientific rigor and real-life pragmatics. DECIS Lab researches systems-of-systems, consisting of humans and artificial systems involved in collaborative decision making under chaotic circumstances. An important objective is the usefulness of our results to our major application domain: crisis management. DECIS Lab was involved to set up a crisis management exercise experiment and according measurements regarding an improvement in internal communication at Gemeente (Municipality) Borsele. In this paper the empirical research regarding this experiment, the methodology and its results are briefly outlined. Our main lessons learned concern the interrelationship between scenario, experiment and measurements; the problem of acquiring usable data; and the challenges of conducting grounded research.

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Wijngaards, John Maule, David Allen, Frank Schultmann: Scenario reliability assessment to support decision makers in situations of severe uncertainty

CogSIMA, 2012

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Basic Human Group Characteristics

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Crisis decision making through a shared integrative negotiation mental model Willem van Santen*

Robust Decision Making: Multi-Criteria Scenario-Based Decision Analysis

This demo presents an ICT system for collaborative situation assessment and strategic decision ma... more This demo presents an ICT system for collaborative situation assessment and strategic decision making that supports effective and efficient protection of the population and the environment against chemical hazards in industrial areas. Robust decision support taking into account multiple objectives entails the combination of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) and Scenario-Based Reasoning (SBR). The adhoc formed workflow of (human and artificial) experts generates scenarios capturing uncertainties. Combining MCDA and SBR allows for structuring complex problems and accounting for uncertainties by the selection of a decision alternative that performs (sufficiently) well for various aims under a variety of different possible situation developments (i.e., scenarios). Robust Decision Making In emergency management, decision making typically concerns choosing among a small number of promising alternatives for action (termed “alternative” in the following). This choice, however, must re...

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Re-Configuration of Web services (COWS)

Niek Wijngaards

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