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In arid countries both water scarcity and salinity represent the key factors which drastically limit crop yield in irrigated agriculture. In addition, relatively poor management practices with pretty low water productivity (WP) seriously aggravate the situation. In order to get “more crop per drop', i.e., to substantially improve water use efficiency, this thesis proposes the novel strategy NEMO (Nested Experimental, Modeling, and Optimization Strategy) for reliably evaluating an optimal irrigation schedule. The proposed methodology relies upon a close interaction between in-depth field investigations and physically based process modeling. It is tailored specifically to fit the requirements in resource-restricted regions. Comprehensive field experiments, on site measurements as well as various laboratory analyses provide a representative database for characterizing the relevant environmental parameters as e.g. the soil properties at the considered location and the prevailing climate. A substantial part of the data obtained from the field experiments provided the input for the internationally recognized SVAT software DAISY1 or APSIM2, both physically based irrigation models which have already been successfully applied in arid regions. APSIM - which is used in the advanced parts of the study - includes not only a process based model for soil moisture transport but also a plant physiological model which describes the plant behavior under specific irrigation scenarios for a selected crop throughout a growing season. The adaption of the irrigation model to local conditions and its preliminary parameterization firstly follows available guidelines and data for areas with similar climate and soil conditions. Reference data and deterministic weather data served to build up DAISY’s basic model files. DAISY is then used within the framework of the custom made and problem oriented optimization software GET-OPTIS for evaluating the corresponding optimal irrigation schedule for a first preliminary series of experiments (IrrEx1). A second series of field experiments (IrrEx2) was accompanied by transient soil moisture measurements, which served for evaluating the soil hydraulic parameters, while the obtained yield was used for calibrating the plant physiological model of APSIM. Taking still into account the stochastic nature of weather phenomena, a stochastic optimization with GET-OPTIS was then applied not only for the traditional full irrigation but also for the most important deficit irrigation and the irrigation with saline water. The obtained optimal irrigation schedules are subsequently used for a final series of rigorous irrigation experiments (IrrEx3) which specifically focused on: (1) full irrigation for high yields with most economic water application, (2) deficit irrigation aiming at a maximum yield with only a limited amount of irrigation water, and (3) full irrigation with saline irrigation water for maximum yield. At the harvesting time, the observed crop yield and the water productivity were compared - together with other plant characteristics - with the corresponding calculated values. The agreement between calculated and measured crop data was excellent. All the field experiments have been performed following a parallel use of the common traditional FAO class A-Pan method and the novel NEMO technology. Based on the outcome of the field experiments, the NEMO applications demonstrated a striking superiority throughout all scenarios as compared to the FAO method as regards economic efficiency and sustainable use of irrigation water in both aspects water quantity and salt accumulation. Contrary to common practice, the optimal NEMO irrigation schedule - which relies on stochastic weather data - has an extended validity. Together with the use of physical data and adequate process models, the developed methodology features a highly promising potential for generalizing the experimental findings for other, environmentally similar, regions. NEMO thus opens wide possibilities for a cost effective and sustainable long-term application to other arid or semi-arid areas.

A two level hierarchical simulation and decision modeling framework is proposed for electric power networks involving PV based solar generators, various storage, and grid connection. The high level model, from a utility company perspective, concerns operational decision making and defining regulations for customers for a reduced cost and enhanced reliability. The lower level model concerns changes in power quality and changes in demand behavior caused by customers' response to operational decisions and regulations made by the utility company at the high level. The higher level simulation is based on system dynamics and agent-based modeling while the lower level simulation is based on agent-based modeling and circuit-level continuous time modeling. The proposed two level model incorporates a simulation based optimization engine that is a combination of three meta-heuristics including Scatter Search, Tabu Search, and Neural Networks for finding optimum operational decision making. In addition, a reinforcement learning algorithm that uses Markov decision process tools is also used to generate decision policies. An integration and coordination framework is developed, which details the sequence, frequency, and types of interactions between two models. The proposed framework is demonstrated with several case studies with real-time or historical for solar insolation, storage units, demand profiles, and price of electricity of grid (i.e., avoided cost). Challenges that are addressed in case studies and applications include 1) finding a best policy, optimum price and regulation for a utility company while keeping the customers electricity quality within the accepted range, 2) capacity planning of electricity systems with PV generators, storage systems, and grid, and 3) finding the optimum threshold price that is used to decide how much energy should be bought from sold to grid to minimize the cost. Mathematical formulations, and simulation and decision modeling methodologies are presented. A grid-storage analysis is performed for arbitrage, to explore if in future it is going to be beneficial to use storage systems along with grid, with future technological improvement in storage and increasing cost of electrical energy. An information model is discussed that facilitates interoperability of different applications in the proposed hierarchical simulation and decision environment for energy systems.

Current research concentrates on ways to investigate and improve water productivity (WP), as agriculture is today’s predominant freshwater consumer, averaging at 70% and reaching up to 93% in some regions. A growing world population will require more food and thus more water for cultivation. Regions that are already affected by physical water scarcity and which depend on irrigation for growing crops will face even greater challenges regarding their water supply. Other problems in such regions are a variable water supply, inefficient irrigation practices, and over-pumping of available groundwater resources with other adverse effects on the ecosystem. To face those challenges, strategies are needed that use the available water resources more efficiently and allow farming in a more sustainable way. This work focused on the management of sensor-based deficit irrigation (DI) systems and improvements of WP through a combined approach of simulation-optimization and irrigation experiments. In order to improve irrigation control, a new sensor called pF-meter was employed, which extended the measurement range of the commonly used tensiometers from pF 2.9 to pF 7. The following research questions were raised: (i) Is this approach a suitable strategy to improve WP; (ii) Is the sensor for irrigation control suitable; (iii) Which crop growth models are suitable to be part of that approach; and (iv) Can the combined application with experiments prove an increase of WP? The stochastic simulation-optimization approach allowed deriving parameter values for an optimal irrigation control for sensor-based full and deficit irrigation strategies. Objective was to achieve high WP with high reliability. Parameters for irrigation control included irrigation thresholds of soil-water potentials because of the working principle behind plant transpiration where pressure gradients are transmitted from the air through the plant and into the root zone. Optimal parameter values for full and deficit irrigation strategies were tested in irrigation experiments in containers in a vegetation hall with drip irrigated maize and compared to schedule-based irrigation strategies with regard to WP and water consumption. Observation data from one of the treatments was used afterwards in a simulation study to systematically investigate the parameters for implementing effective setups of DI systems. The combination of simulation-optimization and irrigation experiments proved to be a suitable approach for investigating and improving WP, as well as for deriving optimal parameter values of different irrigation strategies. This was verified in the irrigation experiment and shown through overall high WP, equally high WP between deficit and full irrigation strategies, and achieved water savings. Irrigation thresholds beyond the measurement range of tensiometers are feasible and applicable. The pF-meter performed satisfactorily and is a promising candidate for irrigation control. Suitable crop models for being part of this approach were found and their properties formulated. Factors that define the behavior of DI systems regarding WP and water consumption were investigated and assessed. This research allowed for drawing the first conclusions about the potential range of operations of sensor-based DI systems for achieving high WP with high reliability through its systematical investigation of such systems. However, this study needs validation and is therefore limited with regard to exact values of derived thresholds.

The world becomes more integrated and sophisticated, especially in the birth of advanced technologies, which have influenced all life aspects. Automated systems could be considered an example of those aspects, which have been affected by recent changes in today’s life. The competition in the market is putting increasing pressure on different manufacturing organizations to find the best methods that enable them to stay up to date with the latest technologies in the industrial field. One of the most famous dilemmas that exist in this field is designing an efficient and flexible material handling system. This issue draws the attention of both decision-makers in different companies and software developers who put considerable effort into making that desired system real. Inclusive research needs to be performed to obtain such a system, and the most significant part of the research that requires special attention is the applied methodology.The approach to be adapted determines the degree of stability of a particular material handling system to function effectively in the case studied. Several methods are available and could be implemented to design that effective system such as meta-heuristic algorithms, and approaches that depend on simulation software tools. The latter approach, which is the simulation approach, seems to get increasing attention from developers of the industrial system since it plays a vital role in reducing the cost and preserving available resources. Besides, it helps predict future changes and scenarios of the system to be analyzed.In this project, a discrete-event simulation model was built for the proposed layout of the main shop floor owned by a Swedish manufacturing company. The corporation located in the south of Sweden, and it produces a vast range of manufacture of goods. The chosen methodology is a combination of lean, simulation, and optimization approaches. It has been implemented on the proposed layout in which material is handled into production lines by using automated guided vehicles (AGVs) as a means of transportation. The analysis of results shows potential benefits, where the production process became more efficient and organized since the operational cost has been reduced by decreasing the number of required vehicles. Moreover, the simulation approach facilitated testing new ideas and designing improved scenarios without the necessity to change the current state of the factory layout or disturbing the regular activities.

Current research concentrates on ways to investigate and improve water productivity (WP), as agriculture is today’s predominant freshwater consumer, averaging at 70% and reaching up to 93% in some regions. A growing world population will require more food and thus more water for cultivation. Regions that are already affected by physical water scarcity and which depend on irrigation for growing crops will face even greater challenges regarding their water supply. Other problems in such regions are a variable water supply, inefficient irrigation practices, and over-pumping of available groundwater resources with other adverse effects on the ecosystem. To face those challenges, strategies are needed that use the available water resources more efficiently and allow farming in a more sustainable way. This work focused on the management of sensor-based deficit irrigation (DI) systems and improvements of WP through a combined approach of simulation-optimization and irrigation experiments. In order to improve irrigation control, a new sensor called pF-meter was employed, which extended the measurement range of the commonly used tensiometers from pF 2.9 to pF 7. The following research questions were raised: (i) Is this approach a suitable strategy to improve WP; (ii) Is the sensor for irrigation control suitable; (iii) Which crop growth models are suitable to be part of that approach; and (iv) Can the combined application with experiments prove an increase of WP? The stochastic simulation-optimization approach allowed deriving parameter values for an optimal irrigation control for sensor-based full and deficit irrigation strategies. Objective was to achieve high WP with high reliability. Parameters for irrigation control included irrigation thresholds of soil-water potentials because of the working principle behind plant transpiration where pressure gradients are transmitted from the air through the plant and into the root zone. Optimal parameter values for full and deficit irrigation strategies were tested in irrigation experiments in containers in a vegetation hall with drip irrigated maize and compared to schedule-based irrigation strategies with regard to WP and water consumption. Observation data from one of the treatments was used afterwards in a simulation study to systematically investigate the parameters for implementing effective setups of DI systems. The combination of simulation-optimization and irrigation experiments proved to be a suitable approach for investigating and improving WP, as well as for deriving optimal parameter values of different irrigation strategies. This was verified in the irrigation experiment and shown through overall high WP, equally high WP between deficit and full irrigation strategies, and achieved water savings. Irrigation thresholds beyond the measurement range of tensiometers are feasible and applicable. The pF-meter performed satisfactorily and is a promising candidate for irrigation control. Suitable crop models for being part of this approach were found and their properties formulated. Factors that define the behavior of DI systems regarding WP and water consumption were investigated and assessed. This research allowed for drawing the first conclusions about the potential range of operations of sensor-based DI systems for achieving high WP with high reliability through its systematical investigation of such systems. However, this study needs validation and is therefore limited with regard to exact values of derived thresholds.

Several exact and approximate dynamic programming formulations have already been proposed to solve hotel revenue management (RM) problems. To obtain tractable solutions, these methods are often bound by simplifying assumptions which prevent their application on large and dynamic complex systems. This dissertation introduces HotelSimu, a flexible simulation-based optimization approach for hotel RM, and investigates possible approaches to increase the efficiency of black-box optimization methods in the presence of noise. In fact, HotelSimu employs black-box optimization and stochastic simulation to find the dynamic pricing policy which is expected to maximize the revenue of a given hotel in a certain period of time. However, the simulation output is noisy and different solutions should be compared in a statistically significant manner. Various black-box heuristics based on variations of random local search are investigated and integrated with statistical analysis techniques in order to manage efficiently the optimization budget.

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In preference-based Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimization (EMO), the decision maker is looking for a diverse, but locally focused non-dominated front in a preferred area of the objective space, as close as possible to the true Pareto-front. Since solutions found outside the area of interest are considered less important or even irrelevant, the optimization can focus its efforts on the preferred area and find the solutions that the decision maker is looking for more quickly, i.e., with fewer simulation runs. This is particularly important if the available time for optimization is limited, as is the case in many real-world applications. Although previous studies in using this kind of guided-search with preference information, for example, withthe R-NSGA-II algorithm, have shown positive results, only very few of them considered the stochastic outputs of simulated systems. In the literature, this phenomenon of stochastic evaluation functions is sometimes called noisy optimization. If an EMO algorithm is run without any countermeasure to noisy evaluation functions, the performance will deteriorate, compared to the case if the true mean objective values are known. While, in general, static resampling of solutions to reduce the uncertainty of all evaluated design solutions can allow EMO algorithms to avoid this problem, it will significantly increase the required simulation time/budget, as many samples will be wasted on candidate solutions which are inferior. In comparison, a Dynamic Resampling (DR) strategy can allow the exploration and exploitation trade-off to be optimized, since the required accuracy about objective values varies between solutions. In a dense, converged population, itis important to know the accurate objective values, whereas noisy objective values are less harmful when an algorithm is exploring the objective space, especially early in the optimization process. Therefore, a well-designed Dynamic Resampling strategy which resamples the solution carefully, according to the resampling need, can help an EMO algorithm achieve better results than a static resampling allocation. While there are abundant studies in Simulation-based Optimization that considered Dynamic Resampling, the survey done in this study has found that there is no related work that considered how combinations of Dynamic Resampling and preference-based guided search can further enhance the performance of EMO algorithms, especially if the problems under study involve computationally expensive evaluations, like production systems simulation. The aim of this thesis is therefore to study, design and then to compare new combinations of preference-based EMO algorithms with various DR strategies, in order to improve the solution quality found by simulation-based multi-objective optimization with stochastic outputs, under a limited function evaluation or simulation budget. Specifically, based on the advantages and flexibility offered by interactive, reference point-based approaches, studies of the performance enhancements of R-NSGA-II when augmented with various DR strategies, with increasing degrees of statistical sophistication, as well as several adaptive features in terms of optimization parameters, have been made. The research results have clearly shown that optimization results can be improved, if a hybrid DR strategy is used and adaptive algorithm parameters are chosen according to the noise level and problem complexity. In the case of a limited simulation budget, the results allow the conclusions that both decision maker preferences and DR should be used at the same time to achieve the best results in simulation-based multi-objective optimization. / Vid preferensbaserad evolutionär flermålsoptimering försöker beslutsfattaren hitta lösningar som är fokuserade kring ett valt preferensområde i målrymden och som ligger så nära den optimala Pareto-fronten som möjligt. Eftersom lösningar utanför preferensområdet anses som mindre intressanta, eller till och med oviktiga, kan optimeringen fokusera på den intressanta delen av målrymden och hitta relevanta lösningar snabbare, vilket betyder att färre lösningar behöver utvärderas. Detta är en stor fördel vid simuleringsbaserad flermålsoptimering med långa simuleringstider eftersom antalet olika konfigurationer som kan simuleras och utvärderas är mycket begränsat. Även tidigare studier som använt fokuserad flermålsoptimering styrd av användarpreferenser, t.ex. med algoritmen R-NSGA-II, har visat positiva resultat men enbart få av dessa har tagit hänsyn till det stokastiska beteendet hos de simulerade systemen. I litteraturen kallas optimering med stokastiska utvärderingsfunktioner ibland "noisy optimization". Om en optimeringsalgoritm inte tar hänsyn till att de utvärderade målvärdena är stokastiska kommer prestandan vara lägre jämfört med om optimeringsalgoritmen har tillgång till de verkliga målvärdena. Statisk upprepad utvärdering av lösningar med syftet att reducera osäkerheten hos alla evaluerade lösningar hjälper optimeringsalgoritmer att undvika problemet, men leder samtidigt till en betydande ökning av antalet nödvändiga simuleringar och därigenom en ökning av optimeringstiden. Detta är problematiskt eftersom det innebär att många simuleringar utförs i onödan på undermåliga lösningar, där exakta målvärden inte bidrar till att förbättra optimeringens resultat. Upprepad utvärdering reducerar ovissheten och hjälper till att förbättra optimeringen, men har också ett pris. Om flera simuleringar används för varje lösning så minskar antalet olika lösningar som kan simuleras och sökrymden kan inte utforskas lika mycket, givet att det totala antalet simuleringar är begränsat. Dynamisk upprepad utvärdering kan däremot effektivisera flermålsoptimeringens avvägning mellan utforskning och exploatering av sökrymden baserat på det faktum att den nödvändiga precisionen i målvärdena varierar mellan de olika lösningarna i målrymden. I en tät och konvergerad population av lösningar är det viktigt att känna till de exakta målvärdena, medan osäkra målvärden är mindre skadliga i ett tidigt stadium i optimeringsprocessen när algoritmen utforskar målrymden. En dynamisk strategi för upprepad utvärdering med en noggrann allokering av utvärderingarna kan därför uppnå bättre resultat än en allokering som är statisk. Trots att finns ett rikligt antal studier inom simuleringsbaserad optimering som använder sig av dynamisk upprepad utvärdering så har inga relaterade studier hittats som undersöker hur kombinationer av dynamisk upprepad utvärdering och preferensbaserad styrning kan förbättra prestandan hos algoritmer för flermålsoptimering ytterligare. Speciell avsaknad finns det av studier om optimering av problem med långa simuleringstider, som t.ex. simulering av produktionssystem. Avhandlingens mål är därför att studera, konstruera och jämföra nya kombinationer av preferensbaserade optimeringsalgoritmer och dynamiska strategier för upprepad utvärdering. Syftet är att förbättra resultatet av simuleringsbaserad flermålsoptimering som har stokastiska målvärden när antalet utvärderingar eller optimeringstiden är begränsade. Avhandlingen har speciellt fokuserat på att undersöka prestandahöjande åtgärder hos algoritmen R-NSGA-II i kombination med dynamisk upprepad utvärdering, baserad på fördelarna och flexibiliteten som interaktiva referenspunktbaserade algoritmer erbjuder. Exempel på förbättringsåtgärder är dynamiska algoritmer för upprepad utvärdering med förbättrad statistisk osäkerhetshantering och adaptiva optimeringsparametrar. Resultaten från avhandlingen visar tydligt att optimeringsresultaten kan förbättras om hybrida dynamiska algoritmer för upprepad utvärdering används och adaptiva optimeringsparametrar väljs beroende på osäkerhetsnivån och komplexiteten i optimeringsproblemet. För de fall där simuleringstiden är begränsad är slutsatsen från avhandlingen att både användarpreferenser och dynamisk upprepad utvärdering bör användas samtidigt för att uppnå de bästa resultaten i simuleringsbaserad flermålsoptimering.