Biblio

Global networks like energy grids, transportation networks or financial IT-infrastructure are crucial for the wealth of modern societies. Reliable and resilient control of these infrastructures thus has gained much attention in the last years. Typical approaches to ensure stable operation of these infrastructures follow two contradictory paradigms, i.e. complexity reducing and complexity increasing measures. Whereas the first are supposed to encapsulate interdependencies and decision-making processes and typically reduce transparency as a sideeffect, the latter strengthen the role of the human actor in these systems by increasing transparency to allow for well-informed decision-making. In this paper, we will discuss these two paradigms and show why intra-actor conflicts arise from adding both complexity and reducing transparency at the same time. We will outline a research agenda to model the effect of these conflicts using the example of energy systems and current transparency-enhancing technologies like e.g. distributed ledger technology.

Surrogate models have proved to be a suitable replacement for complex simulation models in various applications. Runtime considerations, complexity reduction and privacy concerns play a role in the decision to use a surrogate model. The choice of an appropriate surrogate model though is often tedious and largely dependent on the individual model properties. A tool can help to facilitate this process. To this end, we present a surrogate modeling process supporting tool that simplifies the process of generation and application of surrogate models in a co-simulation framework. We evaluate the tool in our application context, energy system co-simulation, and apply it to different simulation models from that domain with a focus on decentralized energy units.

To reshape energy systems towards renewable energy resources, decision makers need to decide today on how to make the transition. Energy scenarios are widely used to guide decision making in this context. While considerable effort has been put into developing energy scenarios, researchers have pointed out three requirements for energy scenarios that are not fulfilled satisfactorily yet: The development and evaluation of energy scenarios should (1) incorporate the concept of sustainability, (2) provide decision support in a transparent way and (3) be replicable for other researchers. To meet these requirements, we combine different methodological approaches: story-and-simulation (SAS) scenarios, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM), information modeling and co-simulation. We show in this paper how the combination of these methods can lead to an integrated approach for sustainability evaluation of energy scenarios with automated information exchange. Our approach consists of a sustainability evaluation process (SEP) and an information model for modeling dependencies. The objectives are to guide decisions towards sustainable development of the energy sector and to make the scenario and decision support processes more transparent for both decision makers and researchers.