The DDSS Research Programme is implemented by the chair of Urban Planning and the chair of Design Systems. Director of the research programme is Prof.dr. Harry Timmermans.

Currently, the two most relevant research areas in the development of Design and Decision Support Systems (DDSS) include the modelling of:

• Decision making and choice behaviour under bounded rationality and
• Interactions between actors involved in planning and design decision processes.

Both issues pertain to users of the systems (planners and designers) as well as users of built environments that are the subject of planning and design decisions. Methods and technologies that are developed in research projects are: Conjoint Analysis, Virtual Reality, Building Information Modelling, Activity-based models and Multi-Agent Systems.

The main objective of the DDSS research school is twofold, namely:

• To develop innovative and improve existing (components of) Design and Decision Support Systems for applications in architecture, building and urban planning; and
• To play an active role in the dissemination of such progress to architectural, building and planning practice.

Typically a PhD research project includes the following stages:

1. Definition of research questions,
2. Literature survey,
3. Development of a theoretical model,
4. Performance specification (functional and technical),
5. User experiment with prototype,
6. Evaluation of collected data, and
7. Conclusion on model performance.