Impact of Energy Consumption, User Behavior, and Policies & Technology on Global & National Energy Security
Tom F. Sanquist and Gariann M. Gelston
This project is part of a broader investigation of how climate change, energy efficiency/conservation, grid vulnerability, infrastructure integrity interact with one another. This research is continued in FY10 as: Energy Efficiency/Conservation & Grid Vulnerability.
Executive Summary
This project will provide forward-looking analytic insights on energy security through the identification of dynamic patterns that relate energy consumption, user behavior, policies, and technologies tied to energy efficiency. Such patterns will establish predictive inference networks that are capable of adapting to change through the evaluation of historical and emerging evidence drawn from time-sensitive data. Critical to this outcome is the ability to effectively and efficiently capture relationships across policy, technology, and social behavior in the context of space and time. This activity will provide ongoing energy landscape analysis with visualization output and deliver scenarios appropriate for use with a gaming module.
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These activities will follow a best practice systems approach to rapid pattern recognition and assessment. We will extend existing prototype technologies to create a proof-of-concept system for key government and industry customer sets interested in real-time decision-support systems. The scenario used for this project will focus on macro trending in response to energy security and its relationship to national security and climate change.
Expected Outcomes
This project will enable the effective and efficient identification of time and space sensitive relationships across policy, technology, and social behavior that influence global energy security. We will:
- Use analysis tools and human expert judgment to identify and structure critical evidence about policy, technologies, and human engagement from large datasets.
- Encapsulate strategic insights from subject matter experts that combine informed opinion, intuitive reasoning, and expert vetting.
- Engage dynamic probabilistic modeling techniques to create adaptive inference networks that leverage the evidence and expert knowledge gathered to offer proactive analytic insights on energy security.
- Provide the ability to interrogate the energy security models developed to support rapid decision making through the exploration of multiple perspectives.
- Develop a critical reasoning environment based on the iterative and mutual optimization of human intelligence and technology processes.
This project will result in a system design that captures the analyst’s information evaluation processes to conduct trend evaluations and identify significant changes that may result in strategic surprise (watch and warn).