A Decision Support System for Market Mechanisms Choice in e-Procurement

Since the rise of the Internet electronic markets have become an important component of e-procurement by bringing together demand and supply. E-markets are meeting venues for component suppliers and purchasers, who use exchange mechanisms to electronically support the procurement process. Exchange mechanisms can be conceived as market institutions providing sets of rules, which determine the functioning of the market and the permissible actions such as bidding deadlines, non-disclosure rules or bid-revocation constraints. In nowadays procurement landscape, mechanisms vary from electronic procurement catalogues, where requests and offers are publicly announced, to e-negotiationswhere the participants bargain over the conditions of a trade using electronic message exchange and / or decision support platforms, to auctions, where one or two sides automate the process during which participants from the other side compete against each other (Kersten, Neumann, Vahidov, & Chen, 2006). The variety of procurement solutions already suggests that there is no single best solution for all imaginable sourcing activities. Instead, some mechanisms like e.g. an auction might be advantageous in certain situations while others are not (and vice versa). In this paper we present a knowledge-based system (KMS) aimed at supporting procurement staff in their decision making on which mechanism to choose best for a specific sourcing scenario

Agile Market Engineering: Bridging the gap between business concepts and running markets

The agile market engineering process model (AMEP) is built on the insight, that market design and development is a wicked problem. Electronic markets are too complex to be completely designed upfront. Instead, AMEP tries to bridge the gap between theoretic market design and practical electronic market platform development using an agile, iterative approach that relies on early customer feedback and continuous improvement. The AMEP model is complemented by several supporting software artifacts

meet2trade: An Electronic Market Platform and Experiment System

The development of new electronic markets is challenging, since many factors influence the market outcomes and hence the markets’ success. Even worse, a fundamental lesson learned from economics is that details matter: small changes in market design can have a significant impact on the market participant’s behaviors and thus on the achieved outcomes. Consequently a well structured process for design, implementation, testing and maintenance of markets is required. meet2trade is a software tool suite designed to systematically support each step of such a Market Engineering (ME) process. This paper presents the generic trading platform meet2trade that enables users to individually configure their own electronic markets, to run them on the integrated auction server, and to evaluate them using the built-in full-featured lab experiment system

Smart Grid Economics: Policy Guidance through Competitive Simulation

Sustainable energy systems of the future will need more than efficient, clean, low-cost, renewable energy sources; they will also need efficient price signals that motivate sustainable energy consumption as well as a better real-time alignment of energy demand and supply

A Multi-Agent Energy Trading Competition

The energy sector will undergo fundamental changes over the next ten years. Prices for fossil energy resources are continuously increasing, there is an urgent need to reduce CO2 emissions, and the United States and European Union are strongly motivated to become more independent from foreign energy imports. These factors will lead to installation of large numbers of distributed renewable energy generators, which are often intermittent in nature. This trend conflicts with the current power grid control infrastructure and strategies, where a few centralized control centers manage a limited number of large power plants such that their output meets the energy demands in real time. As the proportion of distributed and intermittent generation capacity increases, this task becomes much harder, especially as the local and regional distribution grids where renewable energy generators are usually installed are currently virtually unmanaged, lack real time metering and are not built to cope with power flow inversions (yet). All this is about to change, and so the control strategies must be adapted accordingly. While the hierarchical command-and-control approach served well in a world with a few large scale generation facilities and many small consumers, a more flexible, decentralized, and self-organizing control infrastructure will have to be developed that can be actively managed to balance both the large grid as a whole, as well as the many lower voltage sub-grids. We propose a competitive simulation test bed to stimulate research and development of electronic agents that help manage these tasks. Participants in the competition will develop intelligent agents that are responsible to level energy supply from generators with energy demand from consumers. The competition is designed to closely model reality by bootstrapping the simulation environment with real historic load, generation, and weather data. The simulation environment will provide a low-risk platform that combines simulated markets and real-world data to develop solutions that can be applied to help building the self-organizing intelligent energy grid of the future

Responsible Research and Innovation in Industry—Challenges, Insights and Perspectives

open access articleAbstract: The responsibility of industry towards society and the environment is a much discussed topic, both in academia and in business. Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has recently emerged as a new concept with the potential to advance this discourse in light of two major challenges industry is facing today. The first relates to the accelerating race to innovate in order to stay competitive in a rapidly changing world. The second concerns the need to maintain public trust in industry through innovations that generate social value in addition to economic returns. This Special Issue provides empirical and conceptual contributions that explore corporate motivations to adopt RRI, the state of implementation of concrete RRI practices, the role of stakeholders in responsible innovation processes, as well as drivers and barriers to the further diffusion of RRI in industry. Overall, these contributions highlight the relevance of RRI for firms of different sizes and sectors. They also provide insights and suggestions for managers, policymakers and researchers wishing to engage with responsibility in innovation. This editorial summarizes the most pertinent conclusions across the individual articles published in this Special Issue and concludes by outlining some fruitful avenues for future research in this space

Structural, Physical, Theoretical and Spectroscopic Investigations of Mixed‐Valent Eu2Ni8Si3 and Its Structural Anti‐Type Sr2Pt3Al8

Eu2Ni8Si3 and its anti-type representative Sr2Pt3Al8 were synthesized from the elements. They crystallize in the tetragonal crystal system with space group P42/nmc and with lattice parameters of a=997.9(1) and c=747.6(1) pm (Eu2Ni8Si3) as well as a=1082.9(2) and c=823.3(2) pm (Sr2Pt3Al8). Both compounds were investigated via single crystal X-ray diffraction, indicating slight Si/Ni mixing for the silicide. Sr2Pt3Al8 exhibits a temperature independent magnetic susceptibility, suggesting superimposed dia- and Pauli-paramagnetic contributions. The independent Al and Pt sites of the platinide were further characterized by 27Al and 195Pt solid-state NMR spectroscopy, which were assigned with the help of electronic structure calculations. ICOHP calculations and Bader charges were used to analyze the bonding situation. Eu2Ni8Si3 in contrast is paramagnetic with a ferromagnetic transition at TC= 46.9(2) K and exhibits an effective magnetic moment of μeff= 6.61(1) μB per Eu atom. The latter is in line with an intermediate valence that was further proven by 151Eu Mößbauer spectroscopic investigations. At 300 K, the refined Eu2+/Eu3+ ratios are 60%/40%, at 78 K 62% and 38% (Eu2+/Eu3+) are observed, being in line with the ratio deduced from the magnetic susceptibility. Finally, at 6 K a ratio of 68% Eu2+ and 32% Eu3+ was observed. Below the Curie temperature, the Eu2+ signal shows a full magnetic hyperfine splitting, with an internal magnetic field value of B0=28.4 T

Bis(di-tert-butylindenyl)tetrelocenes

The synthesis and characterization of bis(di-tert-butylindenyl) germanium(II), tin(II) and lead(II) complexes are reported, which includes the first structurally authenticated example of a bis(indenyl)germanocene. The species were studied in detail in solution and in the solid, which includes single crystal X-ray diffraction and NMR spectroscopy, as well as Mössbauer spectroscopy of the tin compound