Since the first of December, 2009, I am employed as a Ph.D-student at the Delft Center for Systems and Control (DCSC) at TU Delft. Previously I was enrolled in the M.Sc. program in Econometrics and Operations Research at Maastricht University and I obtained a B.Sc. (first in class, summa cum laude) at the liberal arts college University College Maastricht, where I mainly focused on applied mathematics. During my B.Sc. I also spent a semester at Babson College, MA, U.S.A. (awarded for outstanding scholarship, Dean's list).
      My bachelor thesis (supervised by Dr. Gijs Schoenmakers) was on the usage of cooperative game theory in the distribution of fishing rights within the European Union. In my master thesis (supervised by Dr. Tjark Vredeveld, Dr. Tuomo Takkula, top thesis) we investigated an alternative proof of the `Highway Hierarchies' algorithm devised to solve the well-known shortest-path problem, by using duality theory and a reformulation of the algorithm as a mixed (binary) integer linear program.
      Further back, the first three years of highschool I spent at Minkema College in Woerden; the last three years at Christelijk Gymnasium Utrecht.

With Prof.dr.ir. Bart De Schutter and Prof.dr.ir. Hans Hellendoorn as my advisors, I am currently looking into adopting game-theoretic elements in the modeling of communication and interaction between controllers on different levels within the control of large-scale systems. One of the major challenges in the control of large-scale intelligent infrastructures such as road traffic networks is to find an efficient multi-level control scheme in which decisions by several controllers on different, mutually interacting control layers are taken into account. A theory that seems to be particularly applicable to tackle these problems is the theory of reverse Stackelberg games, in which a leader-player acts first by announcing her strategy as a mapping of the follower's decision space into her own decision space, thereby taking the response of the follower into account.
       A sideline of our research involves the approximation of nonlinear traffic flow models.

You can visit me in room 8C-3-23 in the section of the Delft Center for Systems and Control in the 3mE building:
       Mekelweg 2
       2628 CD Delft
       The Netherlands,
or email me: n.b.groot@tudelft.nl