The Second Joint Workshop with TU Delft TPM and the 13th Economics of Infrastructures Conference

The Graduate School of System Design and Management signed a comprehensive bilateral agreement with the TU Delft TPM (Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management of Delft University of Technology) in the Netherlands last year, and three students from each institution participated in a student exchange program. The number of students involved in the program is expected to increase this year. The second joint workshop between the two organizations was held on May 26 at TU Delft to review the accomplishments and discuss future collaboration plans. From SDM, Dean Professor Yoshiaki Ohkami, Professor Masaru Nakano, Professor Toshiyuki Yasui, Associate Professor Naohiko Kohtake, Associate Professor Seiko Shirasaka, and Assistant Professor Sun Kim traveled to the Netherlands to attend the workshop. More than 20 professors from TU Delft, including Prof. Toonen, Dean of TPM, joined the discussions on various topics including the student exchange, joint research, and collaboration for international contributions regarding education and research of systems engineering. On this occasion, SDM faculty members interviewed the five TU Delft TPM students who are scheduled to visit SDM in August on this year’s exchange program. The project for the alliance has been named “Kompas”, the Dutch word for compass.

The Economics of Infrastructure Conference was held on May 27 and 28 at TU Delft, at which economic issues regarding next-generation infrastructures were academically discussed. 2009 Nobel Prize winners Professor Elinor Ostrom (Indiana University) and Professor Oliver Williamson (UC Berkeley) were invited to the conference at which governance of next-generation infrastructures was discussed from various angles. Professor Ostrom is the founder of research on governance of resources that can provide benefits to everyone without negatively impacting its long-term sustainability, so-called “Commons Pool Resources”. Professor Williamson is an authority on transaction cost economics called New Institutional Economics. In section meetings and lectures held during the conference, many topics relating to research at SDM were discussed, including the environmental economic systems frontier, right of commons, and the Keiretsu system in Japanese car industry. Six SDM professors invited to the conference by TU Delft were actively involved in the discussion.