Effects of the Henry Hub price on U.S. LNG exports and on gas flows in Western Europe

Natural gas plays an important role in energy supply, and its fields of application are diverse. However, the world’s largest growth potential among fossil fuels is attributed to liquefied natural gas (LNG). In the last few years, the U.S. rapidly increased LNG exports, and it is expected that they will further increase the liquefaction capacities. The cost of the LNG value chain is composed of the natural gas price in the country of origin, and the LNG process costs for liquefaction, transportation, storage, and regasification. Thus, the Henry Hub (HH) price in the U.S. is important for U.S. LNG exports to Western Europe. In this paper, gas flows in Western Europe at the beginning of the 2030s are analyzed if the price at HH is higher or lower than expected. Furthermore, the effect of the HH price on monthly U.S. LNG exports are studied. For the calculations, the global gas market model WEGA is used. The results reveal that the price at HH has a significant effect on annual gas flows in Western Europe and also on U.S. LNG exports during the summer. Furthermore, it is shown that pipeline gas in Western Europe will absorb fluctuations of U.S. LNG exports between the presented scenarios

Hochflexibles Workforce Management

It can be observed that companies tend to use a very demand driven personnel scheduling instead of using fixed shifts. In this context the term highly flexible workforce management (WFM) is used. With instruments such as the planning of subdaily workplace rotations, the combination of working time model generation and personnel scheduling or the combination of personnel scheduling and vehicle routing the demand for personnel can be covered very well. Such problems are novel and found little attention by researchers up to now.In this work classical OR-algorithms, metaheuristics and multi-agent systems (MAS) are evaluated on real world problems from logistics, retail and British Telecom. It can be shown, that classical OR-algorithms are not appropriate for these problems of highly flexible WFM, because of impractical CPU-times. On the other hand selected metaheuristics are very suitable. MAS should not be favoured, because selected metaheuristics performed always better. It must point out that a hybrid algorithm (a metaheuristic with a problem-specific repair) is responsible for the success of metaheuristics. MAS lack of a central planning instance that makes major changes for which agents are not able to do. Numerous algorithms of this work where originally developed for continuous problems. The adaption to combinatorial problems is described too. The appropriate adaption of parameters is also addressed.Zunehmend ist bei Unternehmen ein Trend weg von der starren Schicht- oder Dienstplanung hin zu einer auf den Personalbedarf ausgerichteten Planung festzustellen. In diesem Zusammenhang wird der Begriff hochflexibles Workforce Management (WFM) geprägt. Mit Instrumenten wie der Planung untertägiger Arbeitsplatzwechsel, der Kombination aus Arbeitszeitmodellerstellung und Einsatzplanung sowie der kombinierten Personaleinsatz- und Tourenplanung kann der Personaleinsatz sehr gut an den Personalbedarf angepasst werden. Derartige Problemstellungen sind neuartig und fanden in der Forschung bisher wenig Beachtung

Arbeitsbericht Nr. 2020-02, März 2020

Determining size and structure of a company’s workforce is one of the most challenging tasks in human resource planning, especially when considering a long-term planning horizon with varying demand. In this paper an approach for integrated staffing and scheduling in a strategic long-term context is presented by applying evolutionary bilevel optimization. For demonstration, the example of determining the number of employees in different categories over the period of one year in a midsized call center of a utility is used. In doing so, two contrary objectives were optimized simultaneously: reduce the overall workforce costs and retain a high scheduling quality. The results show that the proposed approach could be used to support corporate decision making related to strategic workforce planning, not only for call centers but for any other kind of workforce planning involving personnel scheduling

The Analogical Construction of Stigma as a Moral Dualism:the Case of the Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement

We explore the global fossil fuel divestment movement to show how climate activists worked to stigmatize the fossil fuel industry using analogy. In doing so, we develop a model that illustrates how constructing a “moral dualism” is central to stigmatizing an organizational category. This involves concurrently establishing “stigmatizers” (ingroup) as morally superior and amplifying the deviancy of the fossil fuel industry (outgroup), both in relation to analogical contexts. Stigmatizers strategically employed two types of analogy: “deep” and “surface.” Deep analogies produce emotive power, facilitating the moralization of the ingroup through the transfer of affective meanings from a source context to a target domain. Surface analogies generate causal power to inform wider audiences of the target’s deviance through association with already-stigmatized organizational categories. Analogical power underpinning the morally dualistic nature of stigmatization can therefore empower fringe actors to stigmatize an incumbent as they appropriate meanings from analogical source domains

Application of particle swarm optimization to the British Telecom workforce scheduling problem

This work adresses a practical problem that is of relevance in several industries, such as logistics, maintenance work, mobile health care and security services. When workers are deployed in field service, they must be allocated to the correct assignment and their routes should also be optimised as a part of that process. Data from a practical case of British Telecom has been used widely in the literature to test many different solution methods. We suggest a modification of particle swarm optimization (PSO) for this problem and compare the performance of the resulting hybrid approach to competing solution methods. PSO produces better results than the currently best-known solution that was achieved using fast guided local search. Combined with our previous results on sub-daily staff scheduling in logistics this result underlines the potential of PSO to solve complex workforce scheduling problems. Moreover, there is a strong indication that hybridising a metaheuristic with a problem-specific repair heuristic is a useful approach of resolving the conflict between do-main-specific characteristics of a real-world problem and the desire to employ a generic optimisation technique, at least in the domain of workforce management.Ilmenauer Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsinformatik Nr. 2013-04 / Technische Universität Ilmenau, Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik ISSN 1861-9223 ISBN 978-3-938940-49-

Anforderungen an eine Software für den Betrieb von Ladeinfrastruktur aus Sicht eines Stadtwerkes

Ladeinfrastrukturen für Elektrofahrzeuge stellen eine wesentliche Grundlage für Elektromobilität dar. Aktuell gibt es jedoch kaum Softwarelösungen am Markt, die die notwendigen Anforderungen für den Betrieb der Ladeinfrastruktur abdecken. Diese Arbeit liefert für Entwickler aus den Bereichen der Mobilitäts-, Fahrzeug- und Infrastrukturkonzeption den erforderlichen Funktionsumfang. Hierbei wird die Perspektive von Stadtwerken als lokale Infrastruktur- und Versorgungsdienstleister gewählt

Arbeitsbericht Nr. 2019-01, April 2019

Natural gas plays an important role in Europe. It is a bridging technology for the transition of the electricity system and has also a significant potential to reduce CO2 emission in the mobility and heating sectors. Nevertheless, Europe is strongly dependent on imports of natural gas. While it is expected that European gas demand declines in long-term, indigenous production in Europe also declines. Thus, European import dependency persists. An important supplier of natural gas is Russia. Even if Russia should increase its market share, there is still enough transport capacity existing to bring Russian gas to Europe. However, the pipeline Nord Stream 2 with an additional annual capacity of 55 billion cubic meters (bcm) is under construction. This pipeline probably starts operation in 2020 and has the potential to change gas flows in Europe significantly. Stadtwerke München GmbH (SWM) operate the worldwide gas market model WEGA to calculate gas flows and gas prices in daily resolution until 2040. This model is based on the commercial solution Pegasus from Pöyry Management Consulting. Public sources as well as commercial services are used by SWM to constantly update the dataset of WEGA. For plausibility checks, NBP, NCG and TTF future prices are also frequently calculated. To analyse the impact of Nord Stream 2 on European gas flows, different scenarios are calculated in WEGA. The following exemplary results of 2028 reveal that Nord Stream 2 has significant effects on European gas flows: Transit flows through Germany increase by 17 bcm in comparison to a scenario without Nord Stream 2. On the other hand, gas flows from Poland to Germany are reduced by 14 bcm due to Nord Stream 2. Other effects are reduced gas flows via Ukraine and a redirection of Norwegian gas (13 bcm) from Germany to other Northwest European countries. Furthermore, Nord Stream 2 has also an impact on European gas prices. In general, this pipeline has a moderate dampening effect, with gas prices in Western Europe falling slightly more than in Eastern Europe

Arbeitsbericht (Working Paper) Nr. 2011-07, Dezember 2011

Ilmenauer Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsinformatik Nr. 2011-07 / Technische Universität Ilmenau, Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik ISSN 1861-9223 ISBN 978-3-938940-40-2Abstract: Sub-daily personnel planning, which is the focus of our work offers considerable productivity reserves for companies in certain industries, such as logistics, retail and call centers. However, it also creates complex challenges for the planning software. We compare particle swarm optimisation (PSO), the evolution strategy (ES) and a constructive agentbased heuristic on a set of staff scheduling problems derived from a practical case in logistics. All heuristics significantly outperform conventional manual full-day planning, demonstrating the value of sub-daily scheduling heuristics. PSO delivers the best overall results in terms of solution quality and is the method of choice, when CPU-time is not limited. The approach based on artificial agents is competitive with ES and delivers solutions of almost the same quality as PSO, but is vastly quicker. This suggests that agents could be an interesting method for real-time scheduling or re-scheduling tasks