Institut für Interoganizational Management & Performance

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Modelle und Lösungsverfahren zur langfristigen Planung der Stromproduktion einer flexiblen Biogasanlage unter Berücksichtigung von Verschleiß
(2021) Butemann, Hendrik; Schimmelpfeng, Katja
One of the most important measures against climate change is the shift from fossil to renewable energies. Many countries have therefore made it their goal to increase the share of renewable energies for electricity generation. In Germany, the share in 2019 was 40.2%, of which biomass accounted for 20.6%. This category includes biogas plants, which, unlike other sources of renewable energy, have the advantage of not being dependent on certain weather conditions. They are considered a flexible option for electricity generation because they can produce electricity when neither the sun is shining nor the wind is blowing. When the first biogas plants were put into operation, revenues from electricity production could be maximized by having the combined heat and power unit (CHP) associated with the biogas plant generate electricity continuously. To take advantage of the flexibility of biogas plants, German legislators introduced premiums that contained incentives to produce electricity during periods of low supply from other renewable energy sources. Since then, biogas plant operators have been able to maximize their revenues when the CHP produces electricity on demand, i.e., in start-stop mode. However, a large number of starts and stops of the CHP causes altered wear and tear and must be taken into account in the long-term planning of the electricity production of a biogas plant. The aim of this dissertation is therefore to use operations research methods to develop cyclical electricity production plans for biogas plants that take into account the wear and tear of the CHP and the timing and costs of maintenance activities in order to support biogas plant operators in maximizing their revenues. For this purpose, first a classification of electricity production planning of biogas plants into the planning tasks along the biomass-based supply chain is given. Subsequently, the basics of biogas plants are explained, which include their relevance in Germany, their way of operation, service and maintenance as well as the legal framework for their operation. The research gap, which is filled by this dissertation, results from the literature review on quantitative approaches for the operation of biogas plants. It shows that there is still no research work that sufficiently addresses the wear and tear of CHP in flexible operation and the planning of maintenance activities in connection with electricity production. Therefore, a conceptual optimization model is developed that accurately replicates the non-linear wear that occurs in reality and thus enables simultaneous planning of electricity production and maintenance activities. For better applicability with standard solvers, the model is additionally linearized. A case study based on real-world data reveals that a flexible biogas plant achieves higher total revenues than a continuously operated biogas plant under the conditions prevailing in Germany, even when maintenance costs are taken into account. The conceptual optimization model is then extended to produce a cyclical plan that biogas plant operators can apply on a weekly basis. In the following chapter, a greedy heuristic for generating a starting solution as well as a genetic algorithm and a tabu search are developed with the goal of reducing the computation time when solving the extended model. For this purpose, the basics of the individual solution methods are first explained and the input data are adapted to the problem with the help of parameter tuning. An extensive numerical study, in which the input parameters electricity prices, costs for maintenance activities, wear and tear of the CHP and biogas storage capacity are varied, compares the performance of the methods with that of the extended optimization model. In all scenarios, the tabu search determines the best result in low runtime. A summary and an outlook on further research opportunities conclude the dissertation.
Strategic network planning in biomass-based supply chains
(2021) Fichtner, Stephan; Meyr, Herbert
Fossil resources are limited and will run short. Moreover, the extensive usage of fossil resources is discussed as a key driver for climate change which means that a changeover in basic economic and ecological thinking is necessary. Especially for energy production, there has to be a movement away from the usage of fossil resources and towards renewable resources like wind, water, sun, or biomass. Within the first part of this work a structured review of recent literature on the long-term, strategic planning of biomass-based supply chains is provided. Therefore, in the first step, the overall research field “bioeconomy” by means of the various utilization pathways of biomass is structured and the demand-oriented view of supply chain management models and the supply-oriented view of bioeconomy are combined. In the second step, a literature review of operations research models and methods for strategic supply chain planning in biomass-based industries are provided. Thirdly, trends are identified and conclusions about research gaps are drawn. One of the identified research gaps is to make biomass-based supply chains profitable on their own, i.e., without governmental subsidies. Therefore, new optimization models are necessary, which should be as close to reality as possible, by for example considering risks and actual surrounding constraints concerning the legal framework. Within the second part of this work, an approach for strategic optimization of biogas plants considering increased flexibility is developed. Biogas plants can produce their energy flexibly and on-demand if their design is adjusted adequately. In order to achieve a flexibly schedulable biogas plant, the design of this plant has to be adapted to decouple the biogas and electricity production. Therefore, biogas storage possibilities and additional electrical capacity are necessary. The investment decision about the size of the biogas storage and the additional electrical capacity depends on the fluctuation of energy market prices and the availability of governmental subsidies. This work presents an approach supporting investment decisions to increase the flexibility of a biogas plant by installing gas storages and additional electrical capacities under consideration of revenues out of direct marketing at the day-ahead market. In order to support the strategic, long-term investment decisions, an operative plant schedule for the future, considering different plant designs given as investment strategies, using a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model in an uncertain environment is optimized. The different designs can be evaluated by calculating the net present value (NPV). Moreover, an analysis concerning current dynamics and uncertainties within spot market prices is executed. Furthermore, the influences concerning the variation of spot market prices compared to the influence of governmental subsidies, in particular, the flexibility premium, are revealed by computational results. Besides, the robustness of the determined solution is analyzed concerning uncertainties. The focus of the third part of the work is to consider variable substrate feeding in the mentioned optimization approach because it is expected that variable substrate feeding and thus a demand-oriented biogas production can influence the optimized plant design. In order to support this extension, an operative plant schedule for the future, considering (non-) linear technical characteristics of the biogas plant and the legal framework is optimized. Therefore, mixed-integer linear programming models with integrated approximation approaches of non-linear parts, representing the biogas production rates, are constructed. Furthermore, the influences of fluctuating spot market prices, governmental subsidies, and biomass feedstock prices on the decisions are analyzed for a fictional case example, which is based on a biogas plant in southern Germany. These numerical experiments show that variable substrate feeding can play a decisive role during the optimization of a biogas plant schedule as part of a long-term design optimization. However, the size of the strategic optimization problem makes the use of a heuristic solution algorithm necessary.
Data quality and information loss in standardised interpolated path analysis : quality measures and guidelines
(2019) Schoop, Mareike; Witt, Josepha; Schmid, Andreas; Melzer, Philipp; Kaya, Muhammed; Lenz, Annika
Standardised interpolated path analysis (SIPA) is a method to investigate negotiation processes making different negotiation histories comparable. Due to its interpolation approach, researchers employing SIPA must take data quality and potential information loss into account to maximise the method’s explanatory power. This paper presents quality measures and applies them to two negotiation datasets for deriving meaningful boundaries. Using these quality measures enables researchers to compare SIPA across segmentations, variables, and datasets also providing outlier analysis.
Biogas plant optimization by increasing its exibility considering uncertain revenues
(2019) Meyr, Herbert; Fichtner, Stephan
Increasing shares of volatile energy resources like wind and solar energy will require exibly schedulable energy resources to compensate for their volatility. Biogas plants can produce their energy exibly and on demand, if their design is adjusted adequately. By doing so, the biogas plant operator has the opportunity to generate more earnings by producing and selling electricity in higher price periods. In order to achieve a exibly schedulable biogas plant, the design of this plant has to be adjusted to decouple the biogas and electricity production. Therefore, biogas storage possibilities and additional electrical capacity are necessary. The investment decision about the size of the biogas storage and the additional electrical capacity depends on the uctuation of energy market prices and the availability of governmental subsidies. This work presents an approach supporting investment decisions to increase the exibility of a biogas plant by installing gas storages and additional electrical capacities under consideration of revenues out of direct marketing at the day-ahead market. In order to support the strategic, long-term investment decisions, an operative plant schedule for the future, considering different plant designs given as investment strategies, using a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model in an uncertain environment is optimized. The different designs can be evaluated by calculating the net present value (NPV). Moreover, an analysis concerning current dynamics and uncertainties within spot market prices is executed. Furthermore, the in uences concerning the variation of spot market prices compared to the influence of governmental subsidies, in particular, the exibility premium, are revealed by computational results for a fictional case example, which is based on a biogas plant in southern Germany. In addition, the robustness of the determined solution is analyzed with respect to uncertainties.
Sentiment analysis in electronic negotiations
(2017) Körner, Michael; Schoop, Mareike
The thesis analyzes the applicability of methods of Sentiment Analysis and Predictive Analytics on textual communication in electronic negotiation transcripts. In particular, the thesis focuses on examining whether an automatic classifier can predict the outcome of ongoing, asynchronous electronic negotiations with sufficient accuracy. When combined with influencing factors leading to the specific classification decision, such a classification model could be incorporated into a Negotiation Support System in order to proactively intervene in ongoing negotiations it judges as likely to fail and then to give advice to the negotiators to prevent negotiation failure. To achieve this goal, an existing data set of electronic negotiations was used in a first study to create a Sentiment Lexicon, which tracks verbal indicators for utterances of positive and, respectively, negative polarity. This lexicon was subsequently combined with a simplified, feature-based representation of electronic negotiation transcripts which was then used as training data for various machine learning classifiers in order to let them determine the outcome of the negotiations based on the transcripts in a second study. Here, complete negotiation transcripts were classified as well as partial transcrips in order to assess classification quality in ongoing negotiations. The third study of the thesis sought to refine the classification model with respect to sentence-based granularity. To this end, human coders were classifying negotiation sentences regarding their subjectivity and polarity. The results of this content analysis approach were then used to train sentence-level subjectivity and polarity classifiers. The fourth and final study analyzed different aggregation methods for these sentence-level classification results in order to support the classifiers on negotiation granularity. Different aggregation and classification models were discussed, applied to the negotiation data and subsequently evaluated. The results of the studies show that it is possible to a certain degree to use a sentiment-based representation of negotiation data to automatically determine negotiation outcomes. In combination with the sentence-based classification models, negotiation classification quality increased further. However, this improvement was only found to be significant for complete negotiation transcripts. If only partial transcripts are used – specifically to simulate an ongoing negotiation scenario – the models tend to behave more erratic and classifcation quality depletes. This result yields the assumption that polarized utterances (positive as well as negative) only carry unequivocal information (with respect to the outcome) towards the end of the negotiation. During the negotiation, the influence of these utterances becomes more ambiguous, hence decreasing classification accuracy on models using a representation based on sentiments. Regarding the original goal of the thesis, which is to provide a basic means to support ongoing negotiations, this means that supporting mechanisms employed by a Negotiation Support System should focus on moderation techniques and resolving of potentially conflicting situations. Approaches that could be used to employ further conflict diagnosis in interaction with the negotiators are given in the final chapter of the thesis, as well as a discussion of potential recommendations and advice the system could give and lastly, approaches to visualize the classification data to the negotiators.
Simultaneous lotsizing and scheduling - extensions and solution approaches
(2018) Wörbelauer, Martin; Meyr, Herbert
The present thesis focuses on simultaneous lotsizing and scheduling. A comprehensive review of the literature is presented in which the historical development of the subject and the current research gaps are, based on a classification scheme, described. Additionally, a review focusing on so-called „secondary resources“ (e.g., setup operators or raw materials), which are considered alongside the primary production resource, is provided. The insights on different types of secondary resources help to develop a new model formulation generalizing and extending the currently used approaches, which are specific to certain settings. Some illustrative examples demonstrate the functional principle and flexibility of this new formulation which can thus be used in a wide range of applications. Finally, a new heuristic to solve large-scaled simultaneous lotsizing and scheduling problems is presented. The heuristic creates a modified multi-line master problem by aggregating products into groups. The resulting problem is less complex and its solution can be used to define single-line sub problems. These sub problems are solved by heuristics present in the literature and the results are then combined to form a solution to the original problem. Numerical tests show the applicability of the aforementioned approach to solve problems of practical relevance.
Clustering surgical procedures for master surgical scheduling
(2017) Kressner, Alexander; Schimmelpfeng, Katja
The sound management of operating rooms is a very important task in each hospital. To use this crucial resource efficiently, cyclic master surgery schedules are often developed. To derive sensible schedules, high-quality input data are necessary. In this paper, we focus on the (elective) surgical procedures’ stochastic durations to determine reasonable, cyclically scheduled surgical clusters. Therefore, we adapt the approach of van Oostrum et al (2008), which was specifically designed for clustering surgical procedures for master surgical scheduling, and present a two-stage solution approach that consists of a new construction heuristic and an improvement heuristic. We conducted a numerical study based on real-world data from a German hospital. The results reveal clusters with considerably reduced variability compared to those of van Oostrum et al(2008).
Proceedings of RSEEM 2006 : 13th Research Symposium on Emerging Electronic Markets
(2006) Schoop, Mareike
Electronic markets have been a prominent topic of research for the past decade. Moreover, we have seen the rise but also the disappearance of many electronic marketplaces in practice. Today, electronic markets are a firm component of inter-organisational exchanges and can be observed in many branches. The Research Symposium on Emerging Electronic Markets is an annual conference bringing together researchers working on various topics concerning electronic markets in research and practice. The focus theme of the13th Research Symposium on Emerging Electronic Markets (RSEEM 2006) was ?Evolution in Electronic Markets?. Looking back at more than 10 years of research activities in electronic markets, the evolution can be well observed. While electronic commerce activities were based largely on catalogue-based shopping, there are now many examples that go beyond pure catalogues. For example, dynamic and flexible electronic transactions such as electronic negotiations and electronic auctions are enabled. Negotiations and auctions are the basis for inter-organisational trade exchanges about services as well as products. Mass customisation opens up new opportunities for electronic markets. Multichannel electronic commerce represents today?s various requirements posed on information and communication technology as well as on organisational structures. In recent years, service-oriented architectures of electronic markets have enabled ICT infrastructures for supporting flexible e-commerce and e-market solutions. RSEEM 2006 was held at the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany in September 2006. The proceedings show a variety of approaches and include the selected 8 research papers. The contributions cover the focus theme through conceptual models and systems design, application scenarios as well as evaluation research approaches.

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