EVALUATING SCHEDULING METHODS FOR ENERGY COST REDUCTION IN A HETEROGENEOUS DATA CENTER ENVIRONMENT

Over the past two decades the rise of information technologies (IT) has enabled businesses to communicate, coordinate, and cooperate in unprecedented ways. However, this did not come without a price. Today, IT infrastructure accounts for a substantial fraction of the national energy consumption in most advanced countries. Subsequently, research turned to finding ways of making IT more sustainable and lessening the environmental impact of IT infrastructure. In our previous work we developed LINFIX, an innovative method for handling the scheduling problem in data centers, which substantially reduced the total energy consumption compared to commonly used practices. Due to the computational complexity of the scheduling problem, we were, however, unable to estimate the cost reduction of LINFIX compared to what is theoretically possible. In this work we employ a genetic algorithm to provide a benchmark to better assess the quality of the LINFIX solutions. While the genetic algorithm frequently finds better solutions, the additional average cost reduction when compared to LINFIX is less than 0.1 percent. Taking the computational speed into account, this confirms our hypothesis that LINFIX provides very energy efficient scheduling plans in short time

Building a Digital Platform Ecosystem for Elderly Care: Core vs. Portfolio

Does strategy matter for early-stage health start-ups seeking to build platform ecosystems? Drawing on a multi-year ethnographic study of two early-stage platform start-ups, we analyze their strategic decision-making process as they decide between refining their core service or attracting complementary services. Fundamentally, we seek to understand to which degree startup teams formulate such strategies, stick to them, or adapt to a changing opportunity landscape in such a highly regulated environment. Our work sheds light on the relevance of strategic intent, opportunistic behavior, and simple luck in the build-up of nascent digital health platform ecosystems. Preliminary results reveal that start-ups frequently adapt their strategy to the environmental dynamics, and not every start-up can capitalize on opportunities presented by easing regulations or use them strategically. Our work provides practical implications for policymakers aiming to foster opportunities for healthcare start-ups and for early-stage start-ups seeking to navigate the complex healthcare environment

AN OPEN DOOR MAY TEMPT A SAINT – DATA ANALYTICS FOR SPATIAL CRIMINOLOGY

The vast amounts of data that are generated and collected in today’s world bear immense potential for businesses and authorities. Innovative companies already adopt novel analytics methods driven by competition and the urge of constantly gaining new insights into business operations, customer preferences, and strategic decision making. Nonetheless, local authorities have been slow to embrace the opportunities enabled by data analytics. In this paper, we demonstrate and discuss how latent structures unveil valuable information on an aspect of public life and communities we all face: criminal activity. On city-scale, we analyze the spatial correspondence of recorded crime to its physical environment, the public presence, and the demographical structure in its vicinity. Our results show that Big Data in fact is able to identify and quantify the main spatial drivers of criminal activity. At the same time, we are able to maintain interpretability by design, which ultimately allows deep informational insights

IS-Centric Business Models for a Sustainable Economy - The Case of Electric Vehicles as Energy Storage

The use of electric vehicles as reasonable alternatives to conventional vehicles with combustion engines will become more attractive in the near future. In addition, the ongoing energy turnaround increases the required amount of reg-ulation reserves to stabilize the power grid. In this paper, we employ an Energy Informatics approach to construct an IS-centric business model to coordinate the charging processes of thousands of electric vehicles and sell this aggregated stor-age at an energy market. Furthermore, we analyze the effect of various manage-ment strategies for the IS artifact. We demonstrate that the business model can yield high revenues by utilizing electric vehicles as distributed storage devices for frequency regulation. This additional revenue stream for vehicle owners fur-ther increases the appeal of this sustainable technology

Green Facility Location – A Case Study

“Green logistics” is a popular catchword, not only in public and among companies, but also in academia. In this paper we apply the concept of green logistics to the facility location problem: Optimizing the locations of facilities in the general p-median model. This is based on CO2 emissions generated through transportation rather than traditional cost measures, such as physical transportation cost. We examine the results of a real world case study and compare those with each other. Especially implications for real world application are critically discussed

Intermodal Mobility

Cities around the world are facing a multitude of mobility challenges. Driven by an increase in the number of personal motor vehicles, traffic and traffic congestion are becoming more frequent, parking spaces are becoming more scarce (while also taking up public space), and the urban population is increasingly exposed to air pollution and noise with potentially negative health effects (Arnott and Inci 2006; Arnott and Small 1994; Barth and Boriboonsomsin 2008; Loukopoulos et al. 2005). In addition to producing CO2 and other harmful emissions, personal cars are used inefficiently. It is estimated that they stand unused 95% of the time (Barter 2013) and, when driving, carry only 1.7 persons on average (US Department of Transportation 2011). At the same time, the number of people living in cities is expected to continually increase in both relative and absolute terms. The share of the urban population has been estimated to increase to 66% by 2050, up from 54% in 2014 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2014). Thus, the ongoing urbanization trend will likely exacerbate urban mobility challenges in the near future

Sharing is Caring - Understanding the Relationship Between the Sharing Economy and Sustainable Mobility

Electric vehicles (EVs) could play a major role in making personal transportation more sustainable. Yet, their diffusion is slow and the general public is skeptical of their potential to replace conventional combustion vehicles (CVs). We investigate differences in driver behavior between the two types, showing how sharing economy approaches can help people overcome concerns related to electric mobility. We analyze a dataset of carsharing rentals of a provider who offers EVs and CVs under the same conditions, within the same city, comprising over 230,000 rentals of approximately 750 cars over a period of 3.5 months. Our preliminary results suggest that in fact, once people get acquainted with EVs – at least in an urban carsharing context – they use them in a very similar manner as they use CVs. This suggests that the sharing economy supports the adoption of electric mobility and fosters more sustainable transportation