30 October 2025 – DigiShape meeting at Deltares in Delft
On Thursday afternoon, October 30, our partner HKV organized a DigiShape meeting in Lelystad about AI Arena and AI Agents. Both are promising developments that we expect to be widely applied in the future.
Call: Do you have input for the AI agents or AI Arena? Please contact (details at the bottom of this page):
- Mattijn van Hoek for AI agents.
- Bas Kolen for AI Arena.
HWBP Delta Agent
After a welcome speech by Sophie de Roda-Husman and Bas Kolen of HKV, Cees Oerlemans of the Flood Protection Program gave a presentation about the HWBP Delta Agent. This is an AI solution designed to improve access to the knowledge base of the “Roadmap Sustainable Flood Protection Program”. The main message was that AI agents, leveraging Retrieval Augmented Generation, can help humans sift through more than 200 documents from different disciplines and project stages, making information accessible when and where it’s needed.
Cees showed how to use domain-specific knowledge to share tools and best practices between projects and organizations. Key insights: RAG-based agents can go far beyond Q&A, such as rating systems and decision support, but it’s difficult to determine when an agent is reliable enough to use in practice. There is a need for quality benchmarks, preferably with criteria that fit the water sector.
Follow-up action: explore additional use cases outside of Q&A together with professionals, work on better (shared) benchmarking methods and, given the young technology, focus on practical value through smaller, sharply defined applications.
Presentation Cees Oerlemans: Improving internal access to knowledge in the Flood Protection Programme (HWBP) with AI agents (pdf)
Development and application of LLMs-based tools and agents at Deltares
Jing Deng of Deltares presented concrete LLM applications: a verification plot explainer for forecasts, an inventory for measures in the Rhine catchment and a water management agent for stream discharges and water levels. Main message: Deltares is moving from separate experiments to a central, modular approach with reusable components, so that development accelerates and quality and interoperability increase. At the same time, he invited collaboration around standards, technology choices, inter-organizational agent collaboration, and shared evaluation frameworks.
Presentation Jing Deng: Development and application of LLMs-based tools and agents at Deltares (pdf)
Development of AI agents within Van Oord
Ignacio Quintanilla Rojas of Van Oord shared the ambition to feed agents with “the right bubbles”: internal resources and a carefully curated external knowledge base. To this end, Van Oord is exploring WaterChat (an open-source reference chatbot) and WaterCrawl (a decorative, high-quality document set as the basis for RAG), as an alternative to “the entire internet”.
Presentation Ignacio Quintanilla Rojas: AI agents @Van Oord (pdf)
Delta agents
Mattijn van Hoek and David Haasnoot of HKV introduced the concept of Delta Agents: AI agents for water management that not only synthesize documents, but can also work with dynamic time series from systems such as Delft-FEWS (example: Talk with FEWS). There was a need from the audience for a ‘marketplace’ to make examples visible and to encourage reuse, for agents for more applications than Delft-FEWS, and for organisational assurance (including legal aspects). HKV is working on a first public starting point: delta-agents.nl.
Presentation Mattijn van Hoek: Delta Agent – Talk with FEWS (pdf)
DigiShape arena
Bas Kolen of HKV presented the initiative for the DigiShape Arena ‘Continuous Insight’: a toolbox for real-time risk assessment in flood risk management. With partners such as RWS, STOWA and water boards, HKV wants to explore how we can set up this ‘arena’ as a safe testing ground on top of physical models, to test AI and data science solutions from prediction of water levels and waves to strength/failure behaviour of flood defences and risk maps. What is needed: a secure environment that is close to the user, plus IT infrastructure and validated datasets to reliably test innovation and put it into practice. Do you have input for this?
Please contact Bas Kolen using the details below.
Presentation Bas Kolen: Arena ‘Continuous Insight’, real time risk assessment (pdf)
Brainstorms
In addition to the plenary contributions, there were brainstorms on this day in which we worked in three groups on questions such as:
- Agent collaboration: How do we get agents to work seamlessly with each other?
- Sources and data types: What information do agents need to “understand” (drawings, configurations, time series, datasets)?
- Scaling up and collaboration: what is needed to accelerate development in the water sector and continue collaboration beyond today?
At the beginning of next year, we will organize an in-depth follow-up session; If you’d like to connect or bring in a use case, let us know and keep an eye on DigiShape.nl for the announcement.
