Integrated modeling of food, water, and energy

The research focuses on the integrated modeling of food, water, and energy security, where security is understood as the ability to fulfill the  needs of society for food, energy, and water under standard requirements on their quality and quantity.

Essentially, the new challenge to be addressed is that underlying threats may be generated not only by exogenous events such as heavy rains and droughts, but also by endogenous human-related factors shaped by the decisions of various agents. Under  extreme events and other heterogeneities  the use of mean-values, variances, and covariances, least square analysis is misleading; robust  solutions require quantile-based approaches, and integration of ex ante and  ex post measures with multi-stage decision-making under inherent uncertainty.

The project builds on new spatio-temporal stochastic programming tools allowing the incorporation of quantile-related non-additive performance  functions, the "leader-follower" type of decision environment, network structure of multivariate and multicriteria systemic risk measures, adversarial threats, cascading extreme events dependent on decisions of agents, systemic security requirements, robust interlinked long-term anticipatory and short-term adaptive decisions, new simulation-based  stochastic optimization methods for systems that are too complex for a standard  approach to be used, as well as the development of new probabilistic up-scaling and down-scaling approaches for interdependent data and decisions sets.  

The project coordinates two NMO-IIASA collaborative projects: Integrated modeling of food, energy and water security management for  sustainable social, economic and environmental developments in Ukraine, and Integrated analysis and modeling of land use efficiency and security under rapid agricultural transition due to urban-rural  dynamics in China. It also contributes to the EC-funded EnRiMa project on the development of decision-making support system for the management of energy efficiency and risk in public buildings.

The project is based on achievements of the Integrated Modeling Project (2006-2010), and therefore overlaps with the Advanced Modeling Analytics for Collaborative Decision Support project.

Last edited: 19 January 2015