Dynamic contracting in infrastructures

Contracting for infrastructural maintenance has changed significantly over the last couple of decades from the wellknown ’regulatory’ contract towards more innovative and flexible agreements. Indeed these newer methods offer promising benefits: increased flexibility, better performance and consequently less cost. Nonetheless, these benefits are accompanied by higher levels of uncertainty and more possibilities for opportunistic behaviour on a network level. In order to tackle these additional complexities, more dynamic and flexible contracting methods are required. In the combined research ’Dynamic Contracting in Infrastructures’ we propose a two-phase approach for the procurement and realisation of maintenance contracts in infrastructures, consisting of a procurement phase and an execution phase. In the procurement phase maintenance activities are identified, priced and auctioned to third-party contractors. In the execution phase we focus on the planning and execution of maintenance activities using a novel dynamic incentive mechanism that stimulates contractors to implicitly consider contracted demands and collaborate on a network level. The main contributions of this PhD is an innovative dynamic payment mechanism for the executional phase of the contracting procedure we propose. Using a novel combination of mechanism design and planning under uncertainty we implicitly stimulate contractors to consider contracted objectives, other than monetary, and collaborate on a network scale, even when the execution of maintenance is uncertain.