Increasing heat stress and environmental degradation affect urban lives and livelihoods across Europe and globally. Environmental injustice and climate change often affect the poorest, and extreme weather patterns cause billions of losses. While digital twins offer the opportunity to put advances in science and technology to use for improved decision making for climate- and hazard preparedness, a gap is in translating the modelling results into contextualised decision support that takes into account the cognitive and behavioural aspects of decision-making.

One important barrier for the application of decision models for urban planning is that the many (moral) dilemmas that policy-makers face often remain unaddressed. These dilemmas include how to take into account the distributive impacts of a decision or the trade-offs between short- and long-term implications. Often, especially hard to quantify aspects such as quality of life in a city are neglected in favour of quantitative measures such as cost. In addition, efforts to make complex models or multiple scenarios palatable to decision-makers often lead to over-simplification or over-fitting, neglecting important nuances and trade-offs. Finally, while many decisions in practice are made in groups, models and efforts to establish explainable tools often focus on supporting a single decision-maker. What is missing are systematic approaches that (a) allow groups of decision-makers explore moral dilemmas within urban climate problems; and (b) systematic approaches that balance the complexity of the model results and scenarios with the decision context.

The aim of this PhD is to develop the decision support approaches and tools to ensure that the dilemmas and trade-offs in urban climate extremes can be adequately addressed and explained by digital twins. The selected candidate will lead the development of both the theoretical aspects of the decision support framework and tools that capture the preferences of groups of heterogeneous decision-makers and allow them to explore a range of scenarios. The candidate will also work in close partnership with our two pilot cities (Antwerp and Barcelona) to co-create and empirically test the models and their explainability. You will especially analyse the role of taboo trade-offs and inequalities using welfare economics approaches, and test how these results can be made explainable in heterogeneous groups. The outcome of this PhD is an improved understanding how urban heat and air quality can be formalized and modelled, including moral dilemmas across a range of scenarios. This will inform innovative solutions that can help mitigate these impacts. At the same time, the Urban Air project is a part of Destination Earth, and the approaches and tools developed can inform the decision support of the DestinE platform more broadly.

We seek a candidate who is keen to learn and utilise methods that bridge formal decision analysis models and digital twins with empirical-behavioural work. The candidate will work with data and approaches from across disciplines, for instance geospatial modelling techniques (e.g., digital twins for urban heat and air quality), explainable AI, preference modelling, and empirical problem structuring sessions with stakeholders. The decision modelling framework will be developed for initially two case study partners in Antwerp and Barcelona, but also shared with the broader consortium. The two climate extremes that we will be investigating are urban heat and deteriorating air quality.

This PhD position is embedded in the EU project Urban Air with almost 20 partners across Europe from academia, policy and practice. Within Urban Air, we pursue an ambitious and extensive programme that considers climate change, urban planning and digital 

The potential PhD candidate is expected to have:

• A Master’s degree (or nearly finished) in Engineering, Economics, Computer Science, Statistics/Mathematics, Policy Analysis, or a related field (essential).
• Experience working with empirical datasets, models and (geospatial) programming skills (e.g. preferably Python or R) (essential).
• Excellent study results and excellent command of English (essential).
• Strong motivation to do scientific research on urban analytics and especially equity and moral aspects of heat and air quality (essential).
• A willingness to work in a multidisciplinary research environment, and interest to conduct empirical research with stakeholders and communicate results to policymakers (essential).
• A demonstrable interest in, or knowledge of, integrating problem structuring techniques and different preferential models or xAI within quantitative modelling frameworks (desirable).

The project will start in January 2025, and the ideal candidate will be able to start in early 2025.

Doing a PhD at TU Delft requires English proficiency at a certain level to ensure that the candidate is able to communicate and interact well, participate in English-taught Doctoral Education courses, and write scientific articles and a final thesis. For more details please check the Graduate Schools Admission Requirements.

Fixed-term contract: 4 years.

Doctoral candidates will be offered a 4-year period of employment in principle, but in the form of 2 employment contracts. An initial 1,5 year contract with an official go/no go progress assessment within 15 months. Followed by an additional contract for the remaining 2,5 years assuming everything goes well and performance requirements are met.

Salary and benefits are in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities, increasing from € 2872 per month in the first year to € 3670 in the fourth year. As a PhD candidate you will be enrolled in the TU Delft Graduate School. The TU Delft Graduate School provides an inspiring research environment with an excellent team of supervisors, academic staff and a mentor. The Doctoral Education Programme is aimed at developing your transferable, discipline-related and research skills.

The TU Delft offers a customisable compensation package, discounts on health insurance, and a monthly work costs contribution. Flexible work schedules can be arranged.

For international applicants, TU Delft has the Coming to Delft Service. This service provides information for new international employees to help you prepare the relocation and to settle in the Netherlands. The Coming to Delft Service offers a Dual Career Programme for partners and they organise events to expand your (social) network.

Delft University of Technology

Delft University of Technology is built on strong foundations. As creators of the world-famous Dutch waterworks and pioneers in biotech, TU Delft is a top international university combining science, engineering and design. It delivers world class results in education, research and innovation to address challenges in the areas of energy, climate, mobility, health and digital society. For generations, our engineers have proven to be entrepreneurial problem-solvers, both in business and in a social context.

At TU Delft we embrace diversity as one of our core values and we actively engage to be a university where you feel at home and can flourish. We value different perspectives and qualities. We believe this makes our work more innovative, the TU Delft community more vibrant and the world more just. Together, we imagine, invent and create solutions using technology to have a positive impact on a global scale. That is why we invite you to apply. Your application will receive fair consideration.

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Faculty Technology, Policy and Management

The Faculty of TPM provides an important contribution to solving complex technical-social issues, such as energy transition, mobility, digitalisation, water management and (cyber) security. TPM does this with its excellent education and research at the intersection of technology, society and policy. We combine insights from both engineering and social sciences as well as the humanities. TPM develops robust models and designs, is internationally oriented and has an extensive network of knowledge institutions, companies, social organisations and governments.

Click here to go to the website of the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management.

The department Engineering Systems and Services (ESS) offers a 4-year PhD position on developing decision support for urban climate extremes in the context of the EU project Urban Air.

For more information about this vacancy, please contact Prof. Tina Comes (t.comes@tudelft.nl) and Dr. Srijith Balakrishnan (s.balakrishnan@tudelft.nl).