Suchergebnisse

In the pursuit of energy market restructure to sustainable forms of development, governments have at their disposal an increasingly diverse mix of renewable energy sources options. Indeed, renewable energy sources can be seen as a way to reduce carbon emissions, decrease fossil fuel imports, and meet other energy policy objectives. However, appraising renewable energy sources options is a really complex task, taking into consideration the imprecision and subjectivity of the related information. The main scope of this article is to present a transparent and flexible multiple criteria decision support model, based on TOPSIS extension, using the 2-tuple representation. This model aims to assist the energy actors for appraising renewable energy sources options in terms of their contribution to the energy policy objectives, using linguistic variables. Moreover, the application of the proposed model's software realization to a number of renewable energy sources options of the Greek energy market is presented and discussed.

Climate Change mitigation is considered as a high priority internationally and is placed in the top of the agenda for most politicians and decision makers. The key challenge is that low-carbon sustainable technologies need to be adopted both by developed as well as developing countries, in an effort to avoid past unsustainable practices and being locked into old, less sustainable technologies. Technology Transfer (TT), as an important feature of both the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its Kyoto Protocol can play a key role. TT can allow countries to move quickly to environmentally sound and sustainable practices, institutions and technologies. Indeed, the transfer or innovation process must be fast enough, to reduce global vulnerability to climate change. The aim of this paper is to analyse the TT challenges within the new climate regime, in terms of the process of innovation into an existing energy system, the related barriers and the supporting diffusion mechanisms, with the emphasis laid on the emerging opportunities within the context of climate change. Successful practices will be also presented and discussed by both the developed and the developing countries in this respect. © 2009 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

One of the current energy policy's goals in the European Union (EU) is the exchange of knowledge and experience between the EU-15 member states and the new as well as the candidate countries in issues regarding the development of Renewable Energy Sources and the promotion of Energy Efficiency (EE). Nowadays, the liberalization of energy markets and the deterioration of the climate, in combination with the non-stop crude oil price increase, have had a decisive influence on the development of the above sectors. In addition, one of the most important elements for the renewable energy and EE development is the enhancement of energy producers by renewable energy and Energy Service Companies (ESCOs), respectively. These companies' success is based on the formulation of a modern environment in each EU member state. However, the environment in the new and candidate member states is less mature than the environment in the EU-15 member states, as it is still in its development phase. In this context, the main aim of this paper is to present a ""multi-dimensional"" decision support methodology for the formulation of modern energy companies' operational environment in the 13 new and candidate member states of the EU. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

It has very often been stated that the difficulty and complexity of achieving green energy targets in the European Union (EU) will require strengthened measures to promote implementation of New Energy Technologies, Energy End-use Efficiency, as well as measures to support the related energy Research and Technology Development (RTD). Often forgotten is the fact, that most of all, a European-wide co-ordinated forum is needed to continuously develop and sophisticate the monitoring and methodology results, bringing together specialised statisticians, energy researchers and experts on energy socio-economics. The aim of this paper is to present the Scientific Reference System (SRS) Scorecard; a data validation platform for the sophisticated monitoring and communication of the energy technology sector. In this respect, the concept of the SRS scorecard system will be laid out, the parameters and the scoring criteria will be explained as well as the assessment system so as to provide the interested reader with the basis needed to understand the technology evaluation examples provided, as well as its critical analysis. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to compare the security of oil supply of the 27 European Union (EU27) member countries throughout the measurement of the vulnerability that their economies have exhibited to oil during the period from 1995 to 2007. Additionally, the EU27 future oil vulnerability is to be estimated for two indicative scenarios: a low oil price projection and a high price one. The two projections are going up to 2030. Design/methodology/approach: Six indicators that quantify the core concepts that affect the security of supply of a country have been integrated in a synthetic index that measures the vulnerability of the case study countries for the time period under consideration. For the development of the synthetic index the principal component analysis (PCA) has been applied. Findings: The results of this paper are illustrative of the existing vulnerabilities in the oil supply that may signal for a common EU policy addressing the energy availability risk issue. Research limitations/implications: The main limitation of the analysis is the usage of six indicators in order to capture the core essence of vulnerability and security of supply. The integration of additional indicators in the synthetic index may strive towards a more precise analysis. Originality/value: The contribution of the paper lies in the usage of a statistical technique, PCA, for the development of a synthetic index that specifies the vulnerability in oil for EU27. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Digital government applications are providing more and more electronic services on-line, for citizens and businesses worldwide. However, the new services are in many cases an exact electronic equivalent of existing manual services, thus failing to significantly reduce administrative burden and provide the promised productivity gains - both for the administrations and the final users. Interoperability Registries, as fully electronic repositories of the flow, the input and output documents and relevant standardization, pose as an infrastructure that can support electronic services composition and publishing. In the presented approach, the use of such registries is extended to cover the optimization of manual or electronic services towards citizens and businesses, through the use of Business Process Management and XML Authoring tools. Going beyond the current state of the art, the approach implies a model-driven transformation of service provision. The resulting infrastructure can then become a ubiquitous system, supporting service composition, automated execution and optimization. © 2009 IEEE.

Targeting systematic and formal description methods for interoperability levels of public sector organisations and systems is emerging as an important research challenge in interoperability for governments and administrations. The Government Interoperability Maturity Matrix (GIMM) that is proposed in this paper aims to provide administrations with a simple, self-evaluation method that can be used to assess the current status of the

Purpose - To contribute to the design of the energy service companies (ESCOs)' environment in the Mediterranean countries, mainly focusing on the constraints this company's environment face and the actions that can fulfil its needs and aims, taking also into consideration the opportunities and threats emerging from the energy liberalization and climate change. Design/methodology/approach - The methodology that was followed (based in a large part on the context of two projects targeted to the Mediterranean region and funded by the European Commission) incorporated four steps, the desk analysis for energy efficiency potential in the Mediterranean, the data collection, the assessment of the constraints and the final assessment of the ESCOs' environment. Findings - Provides information regarding the current status of ESCOs' development, in the dimensions of the ESCOs' environment (political/legal, economical/financial, social/cultural and technological), both in the European Union (EU) (Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain) and non-EU (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey) Mediterranean countries. Originality/value - There are no papers investigating the activation environment of ESCOs in a coherent and integrated way in the Mediterranean. This paper provides to decision makers a supportive framework for policy design and formulation of policy priorities for ESCOs development in the region. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

The development of renewable energy in the Arab States of the Gulf has been relatively low in spite of the large geographical potential for the use of these solutions. This market has been stifled by a combination of constraints, such as the absence of relative legal and policy framework, the high initial capital costs and the lack of commercial skills and information. Even though these states have not been interested in these energy solutions for many years, something seems to have changed recently, due to their accession to the Kyoto Protocol. The government, the private sector and the general public have started realizing the inevitability of putting climate change issues on the top of the list of priorities in the process of economic and social development. Apart from this, some renewable energy investments seem to be more available and effective solutions in the region, because of specified conditions and requirements in remote and isolated areas. The aim of this paper is to analyze in a coherent and integrated way the specific constraints hampering the development of renewable energy, to describe the relative efforts that are connected with the stated role of the renewable energy and to propose some useful recommendations for their future development. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The penetration of sustainable technologies in electricity generation is low until now in Greece. However, the recent adoption of legislative rules towards the effective operation of liberalized markets, as well as the increased impact of climate change on the electricity sector towards the period 2008-2012, bring out these technologies as key means for establishing conditions of security, stability and environmental protection. The objective of this paper is to put on the map the sustainable technologies for electricity generation in Greece through the formulation of a collective interactive supportive framework, using an existing multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method to elaborate more realistic and transparent outcomes. The approach was implemented under the umbrella of the national Foresight Programme, to assist policy making for sustainable electricity generation technologies. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Payments market is undergoing critical changes, deriving from technology and legislative regulations. Banks face increasing competition from new players in the market and need to adapt their decisions according to the new framework. Retail payments, a major service that banks provide to their customers, and contribute to their revenues, are more subject to digital evolution. Both strategic and tactical decisions referring to payment systems require appropriate tools that integrate knowledge from complementary scientific disciplines, and provide intelligent assistance to decision makers. Multi-agent modeling and simulation is becoming popular in various fields and especially in social and economic studies, as it provides a bottom-up approach to domains with high complexity. This paper introduces an architecture towards a decision support system based on multiagent based simulation (MABS-DSS), The proposed architecture is oriented towards the retail digital payments domain, but nay be extended to relevant domains with similar characteristics. The paper demonstrates the initial architecture of the proposed MABS-DSS, which utilizes multi-agent based simulation, as a valid approach for decision support in domains with network effects. © 2005 IEEE.

Knowledge management has recently received considerable attention in the computer information systems community and is continuously gaining interest from industry, enterprises and government. As we move towards building knowledge organizations, knowledge management in combination with information management will play a fundamental role towards the success of transforming individual knowledge into organizational knowledge. In this framework, this paper discusses the key concepts of human-computer interaction in knowledge management, identifies new challenges of knowledge management for Web-based business and proposes a ""user agent architecture"" for knowledge management in e-learning environments. User agents use artificial neural network technology and can be used in various e-learning or e-training environments, in order to provide them with means of managing information stored, filtering content and enabling better knowledge adoption on behalf of their users.

In an effort to monitor its ambitious energy targets toward a green Europe, the European Commission has set up a project to enhance the availability, completeness, and quality of data regarding Green Energy Technologies. The Scientific Reference System (SRS) established in the framework of this project intends to support better-informed decisions. In this paper, we discuss the information gathered regarding energy from biomass by using the SRS methodology. First, the SRS approach is summarized and following that we present the findings of the research conducted by analyzing the data regarding biomass, with focus on energy policy frameworks. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

A new research agenda and ground breaking approaches should be adopted in order to overcome energy system inertia and pass through the current carbon constrained economy to new prosperous and more sustainable energy development paths. The wide consensus of the energy sector community (business, academic, policy, etc.) is considered a necessity for the success of such a challenging undertake. In this respect, the creation and operation of a European strategic energy think-tank (EU-SENT2) could play a catalytic role. This paper following an overview of EU energy policy critical issues presents the principles of the EU-SENT2 and compares four main think-tank typologies. The paper focuses on 'domains of think-tank's independence' - funding, agenda setting, ideology and research - on the mission and core values of a European energy think-tank. After discussing on the applicability of alternative typologies for a European energy think-tank, its management structure and basic principals and procedures are described. Copyright © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Public Administration desks are in any country the most active point of transactions between the state governments and the citizens. This fact emphasises the importance of services offered by Public Administrations and in the modern technological era, it is essential for Information Technology to provide solutions for transforming these traditionally offered services into electronic transactions that could be initiated over