Professor Dr. Wolfgang Ketter, Director of the EWI, receives two awards. He and his team receive the Runner-up Award of this year’s “INFORMS Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research”. This is considered one of the highest awards for application-oriented projects in operations research. In addition, Ketter and his colleagues win the Runner-up Award of the AIS SIGGREEN.
The first prize is awarded to Ketter for his application-oriented research on the electrification of public transport in Rotterdam (Netherlands), together with Ayman Abdelwahed, Pieter L. van den Berg and Tobias Brandt (all Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Judith Mulder (Rotterdamse Elektrische Tram).
The background to their research papers is the replacement of Rotterdam’s entire diesel bus fleet with battery electric vehicles. Because the energy density of the batteries is lower compared to fossil fuel, the operational planning of the new fleet is more complex. However, by using advanced optimization technologies, the paper shows that an electric bus fleet can meet transportation needs. In addition, the smart charging strategy can also take advantage of price signals from the electricity markets. This saves operators costs and, on the system side, enables better sector coupling.
The prize is awarded once a year by the scientific organization INFORMS. It is intended to recognize research that is characterized by good writing, a strong analytical background, and verifiable successes in practice. The substantive focus is on better operational and decision-making processes and outcomes.
INFORMS (“The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences”) is an international community in data science, analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI). As a multinational professional society, INFORMS networks members from various institutions and organizations in nearly 90 countries. Currently, the network includes about 12,500 professionals and students.
Ketter also received the Runner-up Award from the AIS Special Interest Group on Green Information Systems (SIGGREEN), along with Ezgi Avci (Turkish Standards Institute, Ankara), Derek Bunn (London Business School) and Eric van Heck (Erasmus University Rotterdam). The AIS is the Association for Information Systems, one of the most important organizations in computer science.
In their paper, the researchers developed a model that empirically tests the influence of agents’ attitudes on their price expectations. They applied their empirical tests in an electricity day-ahead auction. The paper is one of the first to examine agents’ trading behavior and their price expectations from an information-based perspective.
