Interdisciplinary perspectives on the transformation of our energy, industrial, and mobility systems

Realizing concepts like circular economy, bioeconomy, and climate-neutrality invokes a paradigm shift for our economy as their implementation requires a fundamental transformation of our energy, industrial, and mobility systems. Herein, complex planning tasks arise as we can no longer focus only on the economic objectives of one specific task of a single company or supply chain. Instead, we have to develop intersectoral models that also account for technological development, environmental criteria, social benefit measures, or acceptance of technologies and infrastructure by the public. This requires enriching Operations Research models with interdisciplinary objectives and constraints, e.g., from engineering and environmental or social sciences. This talk gives examples on how OR models benefit from multi-disciplinary cooperation and vice versa, how such cooperation benefit from OR results. For instance, we discuss how integrating results of process engineering, energy system analysis, and social studies can improve decision making for the design of alternative fuel supply chains, and how cooperation with policy makers, industry, and environmental think tanks can enhance planning models for future CO₂ transport and sequestration.