APP as a planning and management tool. Having described the major steps in APP,
in this section we illustrate how APP bridges the gaps identified earlier.
As stated earlier, the definitions of uncertainty and risk have implications for how
these are perceived by planners and decisionmakers. APP considers uncertainties in
terms of developments that can form vulnerabilities and opportunities for a plan.
Thus it does not make distinction on the basis of nature of uncertainty and its location
in the system. It also takes into account different levels of uncertainty and proposes
strategies depending on its severity (most infrastructure projects have a long planning
horizon, and uncertainties they are confronted with are level 4 or deep uncertainties).
APP calls for multi-stakeholder deliberation at the beginning of a project so that the
goals of the project and the definition of success can be given, in terms of the
specification of desired outcomes. These desired outcomes may vary from
performance, budget, schedule and reputation (for a client) to cost, reliability and
environmental impacts (for a user) and it is possible to assign relative weights to them
in the framework of APP. Thus APP accounts for the full range of uncertainties,
including those external to the system, those with respect to the system model, and
those associated with stakeholder valuation of outcomes. For instance, Port of
Rotterdam includes criteria such as the competitive position of their port, use of
space, value added to the economy, impact on environment and safety as well as the
impact on the port accessibility in order to assess the overall impact of a project in the
port.