Postdoctoral Fellowship (09) at Groningen, Netherlands

Specifically, we would like to work on the following themes:

•       Electrification of road freight transport: In the coming years, road freight transport must transition to cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels. Electrification of trucks is currently the most prominent option, but major challenges are slowing down this transition. Examples of decision problems to study include optimizing charging infrastructure and scheduling for truck operators, assessing the feasibility of battery swapping for freight transport in the Netherlands and integrating renewable energy production and storage at depots to enable reliable and cost-effective charging.
•       Dynamic Logistics Planning: Applications include real-time ride sharing, on-demand meal delivery, and other contexts where routing and scheduling decisions must continuously adapt to new requests and disruptions. The research will combine operations research approaches such as stochastic optimization and (approximate) dynamic programming with machine learning techniques such as reinforcement learning and neural networks for demand and travel time prediction, to address these dynamic logistics challenges.
•       Fairness in planning educational activities: Important aspects of personalised educational systems is to provide a fair system with the right amount of support and opportunities for all learners, flexibility in the system, a balanced workload for teachers, transparency in the organization of activities and the ability to effectively deal with external developments such as staff shortage. We study allocation policies and task division policies to flexibly allocate teachers with different profiles to learning activities.

Artificial Intelligence is transforming jobs in profound ways. In contrast with earlier technology-driven transformations, where physical automation was among the key drivers, AI increasingly impacts cognitively rich tasks. The risk of job losses and human roles being replaced by AI are a subject of intense interest, including fear. At the same time, the significant opportunities for the creation of new roles for humans to operate in synergy with AI, and especially in manufacturing, are not sufficiently appreciated by organisations and individuals.

The University of Groningen is offering a post-doctoral research position on Human-AI symbiosis in manufacturing work environments. The position is linked to the Horizon Europe project SkillAIbility (- Co-designing human centric pathways for future skills in manufacturing through augmented, empowered, inclusive, and symbiotic complementarities between AI, automation and human task). The project aims to create human-centric pathways to future Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence (HCAI) skills and jobs in the digital transition of the manufacturing industry. It also aims to mitigate risks for social disparities and inequalities by targeting societal, industrial, academic, and regulatory dimensions. Co-designing education and training programs as well as relevant AI tools with workers, especially vulnerable groups, using empowering, inclusive, and symbiotic complementarities between AI, automation, and humans is key to this approach.

What could a roadmap for positive adoption of human-AI synergies look like in manufacturing work environments? How to design human-centred AI-enabled work systems in such environments that capitalise on the best of both human and AI skills? What are skill gaps and future skill requirements in manufacturing and how to develop appropriate maturity models and roadmaps for organisations and manufacturing professionals towards future manufacturing jobs characterised by the key SkillAIbility project concepts of Augmentation, Empowerment, Inclusivity, and Human-AI symbiosis? What can we can learn from the SkillAIbility project manufacturing use cases defined within the project consortium how to instil these four key concepts in them? What lessons can be learned for manufacturing industry, workers, and policy-making? You will have the opportunity to contribute towards exploring such questions as part of a dynamic team and overall project consortium.

Did you know that the Dutch pension and insurance sector manages more than €2,000 billion? And that by investing these funds more sustainably (e.g., invest in sustainable innovations, disinvest in polluting practices), the sector could play a crucial role in transitioning towards a more sustainable society? 

Whether this will happen, and what form this will take, strongly depends on the preferences, expectations and actions of diverse actors within the sector, including individuals who have a pension/insurance, as well as (those working for) labour unions, pension funds, insurance firms, and investors. Moreover, change is only likely to happen when different actors cooperate. This is, however, often hindered by limited communication and a lack of mutual understanding among them, often induced by misperceptions about each other.

The current project aims to clarify the role of the Dutch pension sector within sustainability transitions, accounting for the preferences, expectations, actions and roles of those involved, and the dynamics between them.

Within the Department of Operations, a post-doc position is available on the topic of designing a digital twin for educational logistics. A paradigm shift is required in the organization of the logistics operations of educational processes to achieve a high quality situation where any learner at any time based on their own learning speed, level and ambition can acquire the right part of a specific course in a cost-efficient way.

This postdoc position is part of the research project “Educational logistics for secondary education”. In the next phase of this project we are going to guide several schools in making the transition towards more customized education enabled by efficient and effective logistics processes. We will work with the schools in a design-based innovation trajectory.