Papers: mcdm, remanufacturing, wind, tidal power …

Some more recent papers on green O.R. and related topics:

Wind energy management with battery storage
by L Zhang and A Wirth
in Journal of the Operational Research Society, advance online publication 14 October 2009

Incentive and production decisions for remanufacturing operations
by Onur Kaya
in EJOR, Volume 201, Issue 2, 1 March 2010, Pages 442-453

The Potential of Tidal Power from the Bay of Fundy
by Justine M. McMillan and Megan J. Lickley
in SIAM Undergraduate Research Online (SIURO), published electronically July 11, 2008
link to the abstract (scroll); link to the paper (pdf–18MB)

Checking back with the multiple criteria decision making bibliography site (mentioned in this July 2007 post), I found some more interesting-sounding papers. Thanks to those folks for compiling that list. Here are a few, all from a special issue of Omega on multiple criteria decision making for engineering:

Evaluating the life cycle of a building: A multivariant and multiple criteria approach
by Nerija Banaitiene, Audrius Banaitis, Arturas Kaklauskas, and Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas
in Omega, 36(3):429 – 441, June 2008

The lean improvement of the chemical emissions of motor vehicles based on preference ranking: A PROMETHEE uncertainty analysis
by Malcolm J. Beynon and Peter Wells
in Omega, 36(3):384 – 394, June 2008

Multicriteria decision making applied to waste recycling in Brazil
by Carlos F. Simoes Gomes, Katia R.A. Nunes, Lucia Helena Xavier, Rosangela Cardoso, and Rogerio Valle
in Omega, 36(3):395 – 404, June 2008

A goal programming model for paper recycling system
by Rupesh Kumar Pati, Prem Vrat, and Pradeep Kumar
in Omega, 36(3):405 – 417, June 2008
This model was applied to a case in India.

Forestry and Wood Manufacturing Research Group

There is a Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials (CORRIM) administered through the University of Washington. Focusing on forestry and wood manufacturing, the consortium consists of members from several universities and industry. Life-cycle assessment seems to be an important part of the methodology. The O.R. connection can be found in their objectives:

CORRIM’s research is focused on two objectives: 1) to develop a database and modeling system for environmental performance measurements associated with materials use and, 2) to respond to specific questions and issues related to environmental performance and the cost effectiveness of alternative management and technology strategies. This database and information source will enable decision-makers to make consistent comparisons and systematically characterize the options for improving environmental performance.

There is an interesting little piece here mentioning a CORRIM study favoring wood over concrete or steel for house framing.

MORS Power & Energy Meeting … Coast Guard Sustainability

The US-based Military Operations Research Society (MORS) will be holding a Power and Energy Special Meeting, November 30th to December 3rd, 2009 in Reston, Virginia. From the meeting website:

The P&E Special Meeting will focus on the requirements and metrics, science and technology, Modeling and Simulation (M&S), processes, and methodologies needed to address the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s (OSD’s) Energy Policy to consider operational energy risk from logistics demand and how to frame Energy Efficiency Key Performance Parameters. The P&E Special Meeting will also address the national security challenge of the combined criticality of operations reliant on stable energy sources and the vulnerability of the power grid and fuel distribution system.

So sustainability comes up in terms of energy efficiency but also as far as maintaining critical infrastructure. There was a NY Times article back in July on the US military’s efforts to reduce energy usage. Incidentally, it leads with a quote from Capt. John Hickey of the US Coast Guard, whom I heard speak to cadets at the Coast Guard Academy (where I teach) not long after. Capt. Hickey talked about several Coast Guard sustainability accomplishments at his base in Honolulu including reducing electricity usage by almost 15%, increasing day-lighting, adopting demand respone programs for ships in port, and greening the arms range (which usually includes switching to lead-free ammunition). He also described other Coast Guard sustainability efforts such as the 4 MW landfill gas generation plant at the Coast Guard Yard in Baltimore, LED’s and solar panels on aids to navigation, and LEED buildings in North Carolina and Seattle. (See the update at the bottom of this post.) At the Academy, we are hoping to launch another OR sustainability capstone this spring. More to come…

Lastly, on a related note to the MORS conference, retired Navy Admiral Bobby R. Inman will be giving the keynote address entitled Examining Conflicting Objectives for Energy Independence and Climate Change at this year’s Winter Simulation Conference. The theme of the meeting is Energy Alternatives.

Update (10/30/09): Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen just recently posted “The Theme is Green — Coast Guard Activates Another Renewable Energy Facility” on his iCommandant blog. It highlights a new solar array at the Petaluma Training Center and mentions a number of additional Coast Guard sustainability measures.

The GreenGov Challenge

Earlier this month, President Obama signed an Executive Order on Federal Sustainability that extends a previous Executive Order (#13423, discussed near the bottom of this prior post). The new order sets goals for federal agencies in emissions, reduced fossil fuel usage, water management, etc.

Along with the Executive Order, the Whitehouse has launched the GreenGov Challenge in which federal employees submit sustainability ideas to be voted on by other federal employees. The top ideas are then passed on to key sustainability figures at each agency. Thousands of ideas have already been submitted. So far some popular ones are about telecommuting, motion-sensitive lighting, increased use of electronic documents over paper, and stopping the use of styrofoam in federal cafeterias. Check out the site for more. Being a federal employee, I made a few contributions. Click on the image below if you are interested. My luddite-leaning suggestion (rakes over leaf-blowers) is the least popular at 82 in favor, 60 against, as of today. (Thanks to Ashley C. for alerting me to the Challenge.)

Twitter

This blog now has a twitter account under the user name @or4green. The feed can be also found at the bottom of the greenOR.org main page (as long as Twitter’s servers are up). I will occasionally put brief items there, mostly related to this blog.

I tried following the recent INFORMS annual meeting remotely via twitter through the #informs09 hash tag. Sometimes people mentioned good talks they attended. But otherwise, there was not much to glean from these reports. Maybe it is the 140 character limit, or the newness of the media. We’ll see what happens at INFORMS 2010.

INFORMS 2009 and green O.R.

As you might expect, there is a lot of green O.R. content at the 2009 INFORMS annual meeting. Three of the plenaries touch on sustainability:

• Socially and Environmentally Responsible Supply Chains by Hau L. Lee (Stanford),
• Better Smarter Electricity Markets: Efficiently Capturing Wind, Rain and Fire by Richard P. O’Neill (FERC), and
• A Banquet of Consequences: Adventures in Climate Policy Modeling by John Sterman (MIT).

Sterman, known in part for his work at the intersection of system dynamics and nonlinear dynamics & chaos including key studies of the beer game, has recently turned his attention to climate modeling.

The INFORMS Energy & Natural Resources (ENRE) section has compiled a list of energy-related talks, available here (pdf). Those are likely not all sustainability-related, though some will be. A search of the conference program will yield talks on topics beyond energy and natural resources, such as closed loop supply chains, emissions regulation, green building, etc.

I am not at the meeting, but if you are, and would like to guest- or cross-post some impressions of the green O.R. you see there, let me know.

References: Wine, Urban Planning, Freight GHG’s

The energy and carbon intensity of wine distribution: A study of logistical options for delivering wine to consumers by Susan Cholette & Kumar Venkat in Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 17, Issue 16, November 2009, Pages 1401-1413. (pdf of the paper).
If you buy wine you might have noticed that some wineries have begun using plastic bottles to cut freight costs along with emissions. This paper takes a close look at the wine delivery supply chain from the energy-use and emissions perspective. The methodology is fairly straightforward and the scenarios considered seem to be well grounded in reality. One of the co-authors (Venkat) is from a company called CleanMetrics whose motto is “the science of measuring and improving sustainability”. CleanMetrics also has a blog entitled “Green Metrics, Clean Metrics“; carbon footprinting seems to be a frequent topic.

(Speaking of wine and O.R., there was a nice article in Interfaces a couple of years ago about using a mixed IP to match small wineries with distributors. The testimonial at the end from the small vintner was compelling. Also, there was a brief mention of using O.R. to optimize wine grape growing in a recent OR/MS Today rountable piece featuring (SE CT neighbor) Applied Math Inc.)

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A Mass Transportation Model for the Optimal Planning of an Urban Region, by Giuseppe Buttazzo and Filippo Santambrogio in SIAM Review, Volume 51, Issue 3, pp. 593-610 (2009).
What we would call the decision variables are probability measures describing how inhabitants and services are distributed. The objective is a cost function of the aforementioned variables with terms for transportation costs from residential to service areas, population density and service concentration. It is a fairly theoretical paper, with admittedly limited applicability. It was in the “SIGEST” section of the journal, which “highlights a recent paper from one of SIAM’s eleven specialized research journals, chosen on the basis of exceptional interest to the entire SIAM community and revised and condensed as needed for greater accessibility.”

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An integer programming model for minimizing greenhouse gas emissions in intermodal freight transport by Bauer, J., Bektas, T. and Crainic, T.G., in Journal of the Operational Research Society, advance online publication 23 September 2009; doi: 10.1057/jors.2009.102
A piece of the abstract:

Traditional planning methods for scheduling a service network usually focus on minimizing travel or time-related costs of transport. This paper breaks away from such an approach by first addressing the issue of incorporating environment-related costs (greenhouse gases, to be specific) into freight transportation planning…

So that is a different prioritization and definitely a reflection of the times. Computational results and a potential application are presented.

Polar Bear Battles Continue

The Sep-Oct 2008 issue of Interfaces contained an article by Armstrong, Green, and Soon (AGS) questioning the forecasting methodology used to support listing of polar bears as an endangered species (see this greenOR post). Well, those original forecasters (Amstrup (USGS) et al.) have responded to the criticisms with an article in the July-Aug 2009 issue. A choice quote from the abstract: “We evaluate the AGS audit and show how AGS are mistaken or misleading on every claim.”

I do like the publication of these back and forth arguments, not something you see with most papers. The authors really must dig in deep and support their claims. And the reader is provided with a more in-depth view of the work. A couple of other examples of this were the entropy article mentioned in the previous post, and the green building articles mentioned in this post “Update: LEED building study”.

somewhat recent papers

Multi-time scale Markov decision process approach to strategic network growth of reverse supply chains by Wuthichai Wongthatsanekorn, Matthew J. Realff, Jane C. Ammons (all from Georgia Tech) in Omega, Volume 38, Issues 1-2, February-April 2010, Pages 20-32.
Reverse supply chains take back used consumer products for repair, reuse, refurbishment, and/or recycling. This paper uses a Markov decision process to model the allocation of capital budget resources for the purpose of growing the reverse supply network in a way that satisfies “long term collection targets and collection cost constraints”. A heuristic is developed based on dynamic programming, linear programming and Q-Learning, and it is applied numerically to some test cases. The results are not applied to a true setting in the paper, though the work is motivated by real-world examples from the carpet industry.

Entropy analysis of metal production and recycling by Stefan Goßling-Reisemann in Management of Environmental Quality: An International Journal, 2008, Volume 19, Issue 4, Page 487-492.
This paper uses thermodynamic entropy production to measure resource consumption and statistical entropy to measure materials separation, as both relate to metal recycling. The ideas sound interesting but the paper is quite brief, leaving out many of the details. Goßling-Reisemann has a book chapter on life cycle assessment and thermondynamics as well as a paper in the Journal of Industrial Ecology entitled What Is Resource Consumption and How Can It Be Measured? that generated a written response by John Manoochehri and counter by Goßling-Reisemann in the most recent issue of that journal. I am unable to access these at my institution at the moment, but plan to check them out at some point. The tie-in to green OR is that if these measures prove useful (and Goßling-Reisemann admits in the Entropy Analysis paper that that may be tough data-wise), the decision analysis for production, recycling network structure, etc. has a more solid quantitative basis.

Conferences

Back in May, the IEEE held its conference on electronics and the environment, which is now known as the International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technology. The program lists a number of interesting talks, some with ties to topics discussed here such as using entropy in the development of sustainability criteria, nanotech including environmental appraisal, life cycle assessment, carbon footprinting, energy efficiency in supply chains, etc.

Also, the First International Workshop on Constraint Reasoning and Optimization for Computational Sustainability is coming up on September 20, 2009 in Lisbon, Portugal. This is in part a follow-up to Computational Sustainability 2009, discussed in this post. Here is an excerpt from the announcement:

The goal of this half-day workshop is to bring together interested researchers in order to facilitate the exchange of ideas, presentation of recent or preliminary results, and discussion of promising directions for the use of computational methods to tackle a variety of challenging sustainability problems.

Update: List of accepted papers with links to pdf’s now posted. One interesting-sounding example is Optimizing Fish Passage Barrier Removal Using Mixed Integer Linear Programming by CompSust lead Carla Gomes and Ashish Sabharwal.