Igor Nikolic

Com­plex adap­tive sys­tems engineer

“Imag­ine the har­bour as a garden,”

Igor Nikolic is study­ing the infra­struc­tures sur­round­ing har­bour com­plexes: places that are buzzing with indus­try, trade, con­struc­tion, trans­porta­tion and communication. And con­se­quently, places where there is an ongo­ing demand for inno­va­tion and strate­gic devel­op­ment. Nikolic’s aim is to iden­tify where things can be improved and how it can be obtained.
“Imag­ine the har­bour as a gar­den,” he says. “Rather than being like a camp­ing boss who wel­comes any­one, in any order, the har­bour author­ity should act like a gar­dener. If a gar­dener wants to achieve a sus­tain­able, attrac­tive gar­den sys­tem, he needs to think care­fully about which plants to plant, and when and where. Then the gar­den will attract a wealth of but­ter­flies, rather than just ants. It is the same in a har­bour. You can­not allow any indus­try to set up shop next to any other indus­try. You need to have a strat­egy that is well thought out if you want your har­bour zone to be sus­tain­able, effi­cient, safe and flexible.”

Igor Nikolic grad­u­ated in 2009 on his dis­ser­ta­tion: co-evolutionary process for mod­el­ling large scale socio-technical sys­tems evolution. He  received his M.Sc. as a chem­i­cal– and bio-process engi­neer at the Delft Uni­ver­sity of Tech­nol­ogy. He spent sev­eral years as an envi­ron­men­tal researcher and con­sul­tant at Uni­ver­sity of Lei­den where he worked on life cycle analy­sis and indus­trial ecol­ogy. In his research he spe­cial­izes in apply­ing com­plex adap­tive sys­tems the­ory, agent based mod­el­ing and evo­lu­tion­ary the­ory to model indus­try –infra­struc­ture net­work evo­lu­tion. He is an active net­worker and pro­moter of open source and social soft­ware that enables col­lab­o­ra­tive research work and has (co-)authored some 20 publications.

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