The Multi-Actor Systems Department (MAS) focuses on the use of instruments, strategies and structures aimed at shaping or changing socio-technical systems, or parts thereof. 

MAS addresses the question of how, in such an environment, decision-making, change and coordination of and in socio-technical systems happen. We are actively working in application domains such as water, climate change, energy, cyber security, transport and logistics, humanitarian response and resilience.

In doing so, we describe system processes empirically, we model and analyse systems using a variety of approaches such as system dynamics, multi-agent systems or discrete event simulation, and we design intervention arrangements to improve the systems we study. We are interested in governance issues in which a tension exists between systems and values on one hand and governance structures and mechanisms on the other.