Technical Advances in Aviation Electrification: Enhancing Strategic R&amp;D Investment Analysis through Simulation Decomposition

Mariia Kozlova,Timo Nykänen,Julian Yeomans

doi:10.3390/su14010414

Technical Advances in Aviation Electrification: Enhancing Strategic R&D Investment Analysis through Simulation Decomposition

Mariia Kozlova, Timo Nykänen + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su14010414

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Abstract

Computational decision-making in “real world” environmental and sustainability contexts frequently requires the need to contrast numerous uncertain factors and difficult-to-capture dimensions. Monte Carlo simulation modelling has frequently been employed to integrate the uncertain inputs and to construct probability distributions of the resulting outputs. Visual analytics and data visualization can be used to support the processing, analyzing, and communicating of the influence of multi-variable uncertainties on the decision-making process. In this paper, the novel Simulation Decomposition (SimDec) analytical technique is used to quantitatively examine carbon emission impacts resulting from a transformation of the aviation industry toward a state of greater airline electrification. SimDec is used to decompose a Monte Carlo model of the flying range of all-electric aircraft based upon improvements to batteries and motor efficiencies. Since SimDec can be run concurrently with any Monte Carlo model with only negligible additional overhead, it can easily be extended into the analysis of any environmental application that employs simulation. This generalizability in conjunction with its straightforward visualizations of complex stochastic uncertainties makes the practical contributions of SimDec very powerful in environmental decision-making.

Highlights

Environmental sustainability problems frequently require the need for practical, “real world” decision-making to compute solutions to situations possessing numerous uncertain factors and unquantified dimensions [1]
The link between carbon emissions from the aviation industry to climate change was firmly established in the 1992 report of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) [2]
From the Monte Carlo simulation, the decomposed distribution of the possible flying range based upon the specific energy of batteries and the specific power of an electric

Summary

Introduction

Environmental sustainability problems frequently require the need for practical, “real world” decision-making to compute solutions to situations possessing numerous uncertain factors and unquantified dimensions [1]. This study applies a novel analytical technique to quantitatively examine the carbon emission impacts resulting from a transformation of the aviation industry toward a state of greater airline electrification. The link between carbon emissions from the aviation industry to climate change was firmly established in the 1992 report of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) [2]. While many industry sectors have actively been reducing their carbon footprints, the emissions from the aviation industry have increased by more than 75% from their 1990 levels [5,7]. The biggest culprits in aviation emissions are the long-distance, commercial flights, and this long-haul aviation segment is the hardest to decarbonize, by far [4]

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