Semantic Economic Models for Bioenergy Projects

One of the sustainable solutions to the depleting fossils fuels is bioenergy, which is a renewable energy generated from biomass, and biofuel is a hydrocarbon fuel that is produced from biomass. Recently, bioenergy and biofuel projects are encouraged and supported by many governments and organizations in various ways such as providing incentives, technical supports, information, and decision support tools. The economic model is one of the decision support tools, which helps to estimate the costs and earnings involved in a project. It is constructed with various elements such as concepts, relations, logics, constants, and equations. In current economic models, all the elements are hard-coded into some programming code, which makes the model less reusable and extendable. To address the issue, we present an ontology-based economic model in this paper. In particular, we have leveraged the Semantic Web technologies to represent the knowledge about the bioenergy and biofuel economics and inferred the equations and other values required for economic calculations. The case study has been carried out in two of the INTERREG Projects and found promising results.

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Applying Semantic Web Technologies to Ontology Alignment

International Journal of Intelligent Information Technologies ◽

10.4018/jiit.2012010101 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

pp. 1-9 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Hayden Wimmer ◽

Victoria Yoon ◽

Roy Rada

Keyword(s):

Decision Support ◽

World Wide ◽

Decision Support Tools ◽

Ontology Alignment ◽

Semantic Web Technologies ◽

Intelligent Computing ◽

Web Technologies ◽

Support Tools ◽

The World ◽

Interaction Problem

Ontologies are the backbone of intelligent computing on the World Wide Web but also crucial in many decision support situations. Many sophisticated tools have been developed to support working with ontologies, including prominently exploiting the vast array of existing ontologies. A system called ALIGN is developed that demonstrates how to use freely available tools to facilitate ontology alignment. First two ontologies are built with the ontology editor Protégé and represented in OWL. ALIGN then accesses these ontologies via Java’s JENA framework and SPARQL queries. The efficacy of the ALIGN prototype is demonstrated on a drug-drug interaction problem. The prototype could readily be applied to other domains or be incorporated into decision support tools.

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Decision Support Tools for Managing Unpredictability in the Supply Chain

10.1115/imece2000-1183 ◽

2000 ◽

Author(s):

Carol Vesier

Keyword(s):

Supply Chain ◽

Decision Support ◽

Inventory Management ◽

Production Scheduling ◽

Capital Investment ◽

Investment Strategy ◽

Decision Support Tools ◽

Business Outcomes ◽

Support Tools

Abstract Effectively managing unpredictability requires decision support tools that can predict the financial and business outcomes of various supply chain strategies. This paper will discuss the role of these decision support tools and their characteristics as well as review a case study. In the case study, decision support tools facilitated development of strategies that increased after tax profit by $140 Million. These strategies included: • Reliability improvement strategy: Identifying the reliability improvements that offered the biggest profitability impact. • Supply chain strategy: Defining inventory management and production scheduling rules that ensured order shipment within two days. • Capital investment strategy: Defining when new capacity should come on line as well as the minimum capital investment.

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Exploring Public Sector Managers’ Motivations in Deploying Decision Support Tools to the Street Level

Policy Quarterly ◽

10.26686/pq.v15i1.5298 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Chris McIntyre

Keyword(s):

Decision Support ◽

Public Sector ◽

Digital Tools ◽

Decision Support Tools ◽

Structured Interviews ◽

Senior Managers ◽

Street Level ◽

Support Tools ◽

Public Sector Managers

This article explores the motivations of public sector managers in developing and deploying digital tools to support decision making at the front lines of public service delivery. Two digital decision support tools created by New Zealand’s Ministry of Social Development are presented as a case study, drawing primarily on semi-structured interviews with senior managers. Results provide empirical evidence that public sector managers deploy digital tools not to curtail, but to support street-level bureaucrats’ discretion. Managers appear to be motivated not by increased control over front-line staff, but, rather, by improving clients’ experience of the system and decreasing longterm service costs.

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