This poster presents the “Accelerating Innovation” programme, a set up for three PhD research projects that was created within the collaboration between the Royal Schiphol Group and the Industrial Design Engineering faculty of the TU Delft. With this collaboration, researchers from the IDE faculty were engaged in three challenges: (1) designing towards pandemic antifragility in Multimodal Transport Hubs (MTHs); (2) transforming Airport Hubs into passenger-oriented MTHs, and (3) investigating the adoption of autonomous processes in the context of organizations. An action research methodology is followed in the projects, meaning that the researchers are embedded in the organization, and actively participate in daily practice. This poster presents the scope of the three projects, as well as the studies and academic supervision tasks that the researchers have undertaken until now; we hope to contribute with an example of action-research oriented PhD projects, which could serve to ilustrate transdisciplinary research perspectives. @en

Future mobility systems will likely incorporate more multimodal journeys. These multimodal journeys integrate multiple modes of transport, and their higher future prevalence highlights the importance of paying attention to the modality transfers within journeys. To carefully facilitate these transfers, we advocate the creation of passenger-oriented Multimodal Transport Hubs (MTHs), which integrate both infrastructure and services of multiple travel modalities to ensure high-quality transfers between the different modes of transport. This study is part of a research project investigating how Airport Hubs can transform into MTHs and aims to learn in practice how the case study FlyHub deals with new travel modalities and how FlyHub integrates these into its ecosystem. Through the presence of an embedded researcher in the case study context, performing the explorative pre-step of the Action Research approach, the study builds an understanding of the context and the rationale for possible succeeding cycles of action and research. Accordingly, we identified five themes that either stimulate or thwart the transition of FlyHub into an MTH. The five themes are 1) recognition of the importance of innovation and long-term outlook, 2) limited exploration possibilities, 3) the MTH concept being (too) abstract, 4) multi-system transition going slow, and 5) changes and transitions being a struggle for power.@en

Developments in sustainability and digitisation outline a future of mobility, with multimodal transport becoming the new normal. Travel modalities will no longer be the focal point of mobility, but passenger experiences and the services that provide these will. In a mobility landscape where the passenger experience is key, and multi-leg trips are the norm, Multimodal Transport Hubs are essential players as they can facilitate high-quality intermodal transfers. However, this advanced application of Multimodal Transport Hubs does not yet exist in practice. By employing a scoping review, this research aims to investigate the position of airport hubs as Multimodal Transport Hubs in the future of mobility, as airport hubs physically unite several transport infrastructures but only offer transfers with high-quality services within air traffic and not – to, from and between other modalities. To become future-proof, airport hubs should transform into truly Multimodal Transport Hubs that provide transfers with high-quality services from at least ultra-long to long and medium-range modalities. However, airport hubs have features such as a complex stakeholder landscape, long development times, reliance on transport operators and uncertainty about the added value of integrating new travel modalities that make modality innovation at airport hubs a systemic design challenge. This research identified a lack of theoretical knowledge regarding harnessing and integrating alternative and new modalities at airport hubs to transform them into fully integrated Multimodal Transport Hubs. In particular, how to assess and select new and alternative modalities, how to determine the appropriate level of engagement in different stages, and how to integrate new modalities at airport hubs should be investigated in future research.@en