Collaborative Modeling and Decision-Making for Complex Energy Systems

This volume provides the fundamentals of involving stakeholders in collaborative modeling of energy systems, including the technical subsystem as well as its economic, social, environmental and political subsystems. It presents a Stakeholder-Assisted Modeling and Policy Design (SAM-PD) framework that can be applied by energy system developers, managers and decisionmakers to involve a wide range of stakeholders in group model-building on a larger scale.By illustrating the capabilities of the SAM-PD framework, the book introduces an actual case study of the Cape Wind Offshore Wind Energy project. This case study details the process by which the author brought together a large number of stakeholders to jointly model the Cape Wind energy system and its broader implications for the regional energy picture and the regional economy and environment. It also offers the most recent in-depth analysis of the Cape Wind project.

Dr. Ali Mostashari is the Director of the Sociotechnical Systems Program and the Director of Center for Complex Adaptive Sociotechnological Systems (COMPASS) at Stevens Institute of Technology, where he also serves as an Associate Professor at the School of Systems and Enterprises. From 2008-2012 he served as the program chair for the Infrastructure Systems Program at Stevens. 

Together with Prof. Matthias Finger (EPFL, Switzerland), Dr. Mostashari is the co-lead of the Intelligent Governance of Large-scale Urban Systems (IGLUS) Project, a consortium of 16 universities in 16 major megacities across five continents studying the future of urban systems and leveraging information technology and embedded sensor networks to provide better services to citizens worldwide.  

Dr. Mostashari's scholarly interests include sustainable development, complex sociotechnological systems such as the cognitive/smart power grid, transportation and energy infrastructure systems and complex social/organizational systems. He teaches courses on Systems Engineering Research Methods, Infrastructure Systems and Dynamic Modeling of Systems and Enterprises. During his time at Steven, Dr. Mostashari has served as a Principal and co-Principal investigator on major research grants related to port infrastructure resilience, cognitive enterprises and agile systems engineering concept of operations.