The construction industry faces multiple transitions. Climate change, digitalization, circularity, and CO2-reduction have fundamental consequences for the organization and management of the construction industry. These transitions culminate in international agreements such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, 11: Sustainable Cities and Infrastructure, and 13: Climate action) and the 2015 Paris agreement. The complexity and nature of the challenges in the construction industry urges a move towards integrated and resilient civil engineering solutions that move beyond individual projects and single supply chains.
Infrastructure projects are situated in systems and (sub)sectors that have their own configuration of actors, regulations, and practices. Moreover, programming, design, planning, construction, maintenance, operation, and deconstruction are phases that need to be connected in order to provide a solid business case for industry practices. As such, a vision on resilient and integrative projects and programs, based on learning and managing values among the quadruple helix of industry, research, government and society is needed. At the Construction Engineering and Management (CME) cluster of the Department of Civil Engineering and Management (CEM) at the University of Twente (UT), we consider innovation in construction and infrastructure management practices as the backbone of the transition towards a sustainable and resilient living environment.
The CME cluster consists of two chairs: Market Dynamics and Integrated Project Delivery. (A third chair for Soil Micro Mechanics will be established soon.)
The Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) research group envisions sustainable and resilient infrastructure through integrated project delivery:
- We facilitate change in project practices related to innovative approaches for asset management, risk management, value management & project management
- We advance policies, frameworks and tools to manage multi-actor processes, e.g. related to public procurement and citizen participation
- We elaborate socio-technical and integrative scenarios for individual transitions and interconnected systemic societal challenges
- We co-create interdisciplinary mission-oriented networks and ecosystems in which public and private actors pursue innovation in the construction industry
To achieve our vision of sustainable and resilient infrastructure through integrated project delivery, the IPD research group’s mission is to contribute to engineering solutions on different levels in which socio-technical transitions take shape, ranging from sector dynamics to project practices. This asks for interdisciplinary research, in which different disciplines and fields are applied. Our mission is guided by two research lines, each addressing two levels on which innovations are developed: 1) resilient infrastructure systems, and 2) value-based project and programme delivery.
