Elizabeth B. Connelly

Risk Analysis of Biofuels Industry for Aviation with Scenario-Based Expert Elicitation

The aviation sector relies almost exclusively on petroleum-derived fuels at the present time. Due to concerns including national security, long-term availability of crude oil feedstock, and environmental impacts, there is an increasing interest in identifying alternatives to conventional jet fuel. Viable alternatives must meet a number of criteria, related to quality and quantity of supply, cost-competitiveness, and environmental sustainability. Priorities for diverse industry initiatives for the development of a biojet fuel industry are influenced by uncertainties including environmental regulation, market prices of crude oil and refinery products, and competition from other industries. This work uses scenario-based preferences to elicit and inform decision makers on the combinations of emergent and future conditions that are most impactful to the priorities for the industry. The analysis also reveals which initiatives are robust to evolving political, economic, and technological conditions, thus supporting decision-making relevant to establishing a secure supply of biojet fuel. The method and its results are helpful to the generation of systems engineering requirements recognizing key sources of risk for an emerging industry.

Resilience analytics with disruption of preferences and lifecycle cost analysis for energy microgrids

Innovative technologies are presenting opportunities to improve resilience of energy plans for industrial and military installations. The investment rationale is complicated by uncertain future conditions across the system lifecycle, including technology, climate, economy, and others. This paper introduces resilience analytics with scenario-based preferences as follows. Risk is addressed here as the degree of disruption of priorities for investments in engineering systems. The particular concern of this paper is disruption from shifts in public values, and to evaluate the resilience of investment plans to such shifts. It recognizes resilience models as compilations of instantaneous framings of initiatives, objectives, stakeholder preferences, and uncertainties. Problem frames can be considered in series, where inputs to frames are the outputs of previous frames. Or frames can be considered in parallel, featuring joint inputs while addressing differing questions. This paper presents a case study of resilience analytics focusing on two quantitative frames. In the first frame, scenario-based preferences are used to identify combinations of factors disruptive to energy innovation at installations. In the second frame, estimation of lifecycle costs is performed with respect to factors that were identified as influential in the previous frame.

Modeling and simulation of fleet vehicle batteries for integrated logistics and grid services

Vehicle to grid technologies (V2G) utilize the batteries in electric vehicles (EV) to provide ancillary services to the electric power grid. In order to maintain a 60-hertz frequency in the electric grid, there exists a wholesale market for frequency regulation (FR), a specific type of ancillary service. This paper examines V2G technology for providing FR, while focusing on the effect FR service has on battery life, state of charge, and potential revenue. Fleet vehicles are prime candidates for FR, as most are only active a portion of the day. During FR, a small amount of charge is drawn and released from the battery several times a minute, each cycle helping to stabilize the electric grid. Battery degradation, the loss of battery capacity over time, is crucial to the feasibility of V2G. Degradation is influenced by several factors including temperature, total electrical throughput, and the rate energy is taken from the battery. Using historical frequency regulation signals coupled with a throughput based equation for battery degradation, a model analyzes the effects of FR on battery life, battery state of charge, and revenues generated. An analytical simulation written in Java, and a conceptual simulation made in Simio are used for analysis. Results suggest that FR does not dramatically alter the state of charge of a battery and has a minimal impact on battery life. Furthermore, the revenues from FR far exceed costs of degradation. The findings support that V2G will enable a lower total cost of ownership for electric vehicles.

Robust Investments in Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chains for Disaster Resilience and Sustainable Communities

AbstractEffective disaster preparedness and response are supported by heterogeneous investments in logistics for emergency management. Meanwhile, there may be scarce resources or misconception of humanitarian needs for emergency scenarios that are unprecedented. Resource allocations to humanitarian needs must address deep uncertainties and multiple performance criteria related to population behaviors, environmental change, innovative technologies, wear and tear, regulations, economic markets, extreme events, and others. The methods demonstrated in this paper support prioritizing among humanitarian logistics investments with an integration of scenario analysis and multicriteria decision analysis. The results will aid emergency management agencies in agility and resilience of emergency supply chains and logistics systems, particularly for needs of underrepresented populations. The methods are demonstrated for preparedness initiatives of first-responder agencies in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where favela, or sl...

Resilience Analytics of a Future Supply Chain for Aviation Biofuels

Capacity-building plans for transportation systems must be resilient to disruptions and erroneous assumptions to protect performance outcomes as well as schedule and cost. An example is the future supply chain of aviation biofuels for industry, government, and military applications. The challenges include balancing the aims and assumptions of diverse stakeholders, including regulators, agencies, manufacturers, airlines, fuel companies, and agricultural and husbandry producers. Resilience analytics of the strategic plans should characterize both the influential trends and stressors and the robust initiatives. This paper demonstrates resilience analytics to address varied, evolving, and potentially conflicting stakeholder preferences in the life cycle of supply chains for aviation biofuels. Heterogeneous feedstocks can be converted to aviation biofuel, although several are more attractive across technological, environmental, and economic criteria. The choice of feedstocks for conversion to biofuel depends on balancing desired outcomes, including life-cycle costs, availabilities, proximities, environmental impacts, and the like. Resilience analytics enables prioritization of feedstocks and other supply chain initiatives, with prioritization that varies by scenario. A technology road map for near- and midterm investment horizons to establish aviation biofuels is described. Poultry waste products are explored by using the above methods for a particular region in the mid-Atlantic area of the United States.

Value chain for next-generation biofuels: resilience and sustainability of the product life cycle.

Multiple factors including climate change, price uncertainties, and geopolitical instability have prompted many industries to investigate the feasibility of replacing traditional petroleum-based fuels with biofuel alternatives. However, to make this transition successful, these new biofuels must be environmentally sustainable and the necessary support infrastructure must be in place to make the production, distribution, and storage of these biofuels technologically feasible and cost effective. Developing a value chain, spanning from feedstock production to distribution to end users, requires garnering buy-in from multiple stakeholders by demonstrating environmental, economic, and social benefits and incentives. Two critical factors are the environmental benefits achieved from the use of the biofuel technology and the degree of resilience of the value chain to emergent conditions to ensure steady supply to consumers. Moreover, different biofuel pathways have different costs, benefits, and risks which must be compared. In this paper, we describe how environmental sustainability can be modeled using life cycle assessment (LCA) and how the resilience of value chain initiatives can be modeled using a scenario-based decision model. We then describe how sustainability and resilience assessments can be integrated in an iterative, anticipatory LCA framework. These assessments can be used as the basis for a business case for various investments, as well as a means for promoting responsible innovations, with the aviation industry used as a case study.

Resilience of initiatives to shifting management priorities under emergent and future conditions

Attention of industry, government, and academia has been directed toward the design and implementation of systems which are resilient against external and internal stressors and disruptions. However, less attention has been paid to assessing the resilience of these initiatives to shifting strategic plans precipitated by changes in management priorities. While a particular infrastructure asset or technology may be resilient in a given scenario, the overriding strategic plan may be vulnerable to changes in decision maker preferences, regulatory restrictions, or other emergent shifts in values and objectives. In this paper, we describe scenario planning and decision making tools that may be used to assess the resilience of initiatives across a multitude of emergent conditions, including changing management priorities. Two case studies are presented in which this framework was applied: 1) creating sustainable biofuel supply chains for the aviation industry, and 2) prioritization of infrastructure development opportunities in Afghanistan.

Visualization of large data sets for project planning and prioritization on transportation corridors

Transportation planners address mobility, accessibility, safety, environment, and economic development on thousands of miles of multimodal corridors. Improvement projects are periodically implemented with input from diverse public stakeholders. Various performance metrics and data visualization are used to identify and prioritize locations of the projects. An agency has needs for business processes to identify opportunities and threats, potential cost savings, and programming conflicts across hundreds of acquisition projects in transportation systems. This paper describes supporting data, analytics, and prioritization to aid the planning of improvement projects. The approach includes design of an algorithm to extract relevant data from multiple databases to a single file that can be imported to a data visualization software application, Tableau. Tableau is used to provide an interface for visualization of a six-year improvement program of several billion dollars. The results help transportation planners at several levels of the agency to make data-driven decisions in project planning. Customizing Tableau data interfaces enables the visualization and prioritization of projects considering metrics such as project status, bridge condition, pavement condition, crashes per vehicle-miles traveled, etc. Prior to this work, the agency relied on a program in which users query the status of individual road segments. The lessons learned include how to approach data security while providing flexibility and utility to a variety of users, how to ensure that the interfaces are robust to missing or inaccurate data, and how to account for potential cognitive bias of analysts and decision makers.

Avatar design and monitoring in a virtual disaster for all-hazards preparedness and infrastructure management in Brazil

Government agencies, industry consortia, and companies are interested in scenario analysis to improve preparedness plans across infrastructures, technologies, policies, and allocation of resources. This paper develops a concept for a virtual reality tool for disaster and infrastructure management in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The tool will assist in identifying the future scenarios that most matter to agency preparedness. The tool explores scenarios in the virtual environment for several types of hazards including radiological emergency, urban flooding, power grid blackout, and terrorism at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. The approach tests agency influences on population behaviors and vice versa. Most past efforts have focused on decision analysis and resource allocation for preparedness. The proposed effort inverts the typical decision analysis in order to identify the scenarios of disaster that most influence agency priorities for preparedness. The results inform first-responders in the region, and contribute to the use of virtual reality in interdisciplinary work to identify the scenarios that most matter for preparedness planning.

Advances in the Net-Zero Paradigm and Resilience of Net-Zero Strategic Plans for Water Systems

This chapter describes recent advances of water systems in the net-zero paradigm, across industrial, government, and military applications. The elements of the chapter are definitions, innovations, assessment methods, best practices, case studies, evaluation of investments, strategic plans, and challenges for future work. The chapter benefited from discussion and shared experience of about 50 participants in a NATO workshop convened in Sonderborg, Denmark, in February 2015. The chapter authors were the participants of the workshop specifically asked to address issues of water systems.