Marginal Cost Model Research Articles

Research on marginal cost model of electric vehicle charging and swapping facilities based on queuing theory

Research on the configuration of charging and switching facilities for electric vehicles is an important part of the development of related industries. In this paper, based on the analysis of charging behaviour of electric vehicles, the mathematical model is established by using queuing theory, and on this basis, the marginal cost theory of microeconomics is introduced to analyse the number of charging facilities under different utilization rates. The marginal cost model of charging and switching facilities is established with the objective of minimizing the total marginal cost of charging and switching facilities service system, and is verified by an actual example. The results show that through the rational allocation of the number of facilities, the marginal cost under different utilization rates can be optimized, which can provide strong support for decision makers to make operation plans and promote industrial development.

Optimal Sizing of Cascade Hydropower and Distributed Photovoltaic Included Virtual Power Plant Considering Investments and Complementary Benefits in Electricity Markets

Due to an imminent fossil energy crisis and environmental pollution, renewable energy, such as photovoltaics, has been vigorously developing. However, the output of photovoltaic energy has strong volatility and intermittency. Thus, the photovoltaic generation system cannot constantly meet the load demand. To address this problem, a virtual power plant with hydro-photovoltaic-thermal generation is proposed in this paper. This virtual power plant utilizes the complementary characteristics of the output of the power sources to ensure a smooth and stable total output curve, and the power supply quality of the virtual power plant is improved. Further, the nonlinear operating cost model of the virtual power plant, with output changing over time, is established on the weighted output of hydro, photovoltaic, and thermal power; then, the corresponding marginal cost model of the virtual power plant is obtained. In the electricity market, three typical mid- to long-term electricity decomposition methods based on average, tracking load and spot price are constructed, and the spot price is predicted by the auto regressive moving average model (ARIMA) model, while the relationship between the spot price and the marginal cost of the virtual power plant is obtained; the marginal cost could also be adjusted based on the ARIMA model. Based on above factors, the sizing model of the virtual power plant is established, considering investment and complementary benefits. Finally, a case study is undertaken, where the sizing scheme for the increasing local load in the typical scenarios of the planning year and the corresponding annual rate of return are obtained. Sensitivity analysis of the influence for the above factors on the sizing of the virtual power plant is carried out. The optimal ratio of mid- to long-term electricity and its decomposition methods, as well as the capacity of the virtual power plant and the sizing ratio of hydropower, photovoltaic, and thermal power are obtained.

Effect of Period Length on Forecasting Maintenance and Repair Costs for Heavy Equipment by the Period Cost Based Methodology

ABSTRACT Substantial economic investments are made by companies in the construction and other processing industries to own and operate heavy equipment fleets. Average total cost minimization models are used by equipment managers to perform a variety of tasks that are largely influenced by the economic performance of the fleet. An important aspect of these models is estimating maintenance and repair costs throughout machine life. The period cost-based (PCB) methodology can be used to model maintenance and repair costs from data collected over a period of time within the life of a machine. The objective of this research was to investigate the effect of the data collection period length on the resulting PCB models and develop recommendations regarding the minimum period length. Data collected from a fleet of excavator-type material handlers were used to construct cost records of varying period lengths, to which the PCB methodology was applied to construct marginal and cumulative cost models. The results show that increasing the period length increases the quality of the marginal cost model and the accuracy of the estimated cumulative costs. However, this is subject to the constraint that the amount of data available for model development does not significantly decrease.

Bitcoin price and its marginal cost of production: support for a fundamental value

ABSTRACTThis study back-tests a marginal cost of production model proposed to value the digital currency Bitcoin. Results from both conventional regression and vector autoregression (VAR) models show that the marginal cost of production plays an important role in explaining Bitcoin prices, challenging recent allegations that Bitcoins are essentially worthless. Even with markets pricing Bitcoin in the thousands of dollars each, the valuation model seems robust. The data show that a price bubble that began in the Fall of 2017 resolved itself in early 2018, converging with the marginal cost model. This suggests that while bubbles may appear in the Bitcoin market, prices will tend to this bound and not collapse to zero.

Nationale Standards in der ökonomischen Bildung?

As a reaction to the bad performance of German students in international student assessment tests, German ministers of education decided to impose uniform national standards for linguistic, mathematical or natural science education. This gave rise to a broad discussion among German vocational and business education experts on how to design standards for economic education as well. This article, however, challenges the whole concept of national standards for economic education. On the one hand, direct costs of standardization are considered that may be higher for economic than for other fields of education. On the other hand, current discussion on centralization of economic education fails to take into account the indirect (opportunity) costs of oppressing the welfare effects of institutional competion among German federal states. On the basis of a simple marginal cost model, several hypotheses on the pros and cons of standards for economic education are derived from a welfare economics perspective. Using insights from the theory of currency competition, it is argued that much of the social costs of standardization may be avoided by going over to a system of intra- or interjurisdictional competition of educational standards.

Opportunities to improve container barge handling in the port of Rotterdam from a transport network perspective

This paper presents and evaluates an opportunity to improve the competitiveness of container barge transport in the hinterland of Rotterdam through a reorganization of container barge services. This reorganization improves the handling of barges in the port and consists of splitting existing services into a trunk line operation in the hinterland and collection/distribution operations in the seaport. A marginal cost model is used to demonstrate the potential net benefits of these revised services. The main conclusion is that these split services can improve the competitiveness of barge hinterland transport, but the effectiveness depends on several conditions. These conditions are first of all related to the design and organization of collection and distribution transport, but also to the characteristics of the trunk line operation in the hinterland.

An Assessment of the Cost of Recycling Household Waste in Britain and Ireland

AbstractA marginal cost model is developed based on published data relating to both bring‐ and collect‐based household waste‐recycling schemes. Both systems are judged to be capable of ensuring compliance for paper and glass with the EU packaging and packaging waste Directive's 15% recycling target. Only collect systems can ensure such compliance for metal and plastic packaging.

Theoretical Aspects of an Electricity Marginal Cost Model

Theoretical Aspects of an Electricity Marginal Cost Model

Theoretical Aspects of an Electricity Marginal Cost Model

A separable programming model has been built to estimate electricity marginal costs. The model can be solved by applying linear programming techniques, hence marginal costs are obtained from shadow prices of model's optimal solution. In order to obtain more accurate and more detailed composition of electricity marginal costs, shadow prices are mathematically explained rigorously from model's structural points of view. Theoretical aspects of our electricity marginal cost model are investigated by applying theory of linear programming. Furthermore, various types of mathematical expression are also show with their interpretation in the real power system.

Multistage Marginal Cost Model of Investment‐Pricing Decisions: Application to Urban Water Supply Treatment Facilities

An attempt is made to apply a previously developed general model of investment‐pricing decisions to the particular problem of choosing the timing and sizes of additions to capacity in urban water supply systems. On the basis of empirical data, typical but hypothetical cost and demand curves for water supply are defined and incorporated into the model. The model is then solved under varying assumptions with regard to rate of growth in demand, the level of the discount rate, and the length of the planning horizon. The results are compared in terms of their efficiency with results that could be expected from conventional approaches to the problem by employing certain arbitrarily assumed schemes of average cost pricing combined with rules of thumb criteria for choosing the size and timing of capacity investment.The major conclusions reached are that at present we do not have the empirical data necessary to effectively implement the general model in the water supply area and that the results do suggest that the multistage marginal cost approach toward planning and operating urban water supply systems might be 10–20% more efficient than traditional average cost approaches.

A Based-Bottleneck Multiple Vehicle Type Dynamic Marginal Cost Model and Algorithm

Single vehicle type dynamic marginal cost model is extended to multiple vehicle type dynamic one based on time-dependent multiple vehicle type queue analysis at a bottleneck. A dynamic link model is presented to model interactions between cars and trucks, given the link consists of two distinct segments. The first segment is the running segment on which cars (trucks) run at their free-flow speeds and the second segment is the exit queue segment. A car or a truck is assumed to be a point without length. The class-specific pi parameter is used to transform the effect of truck into passenger car equivalents, so the exit flow of cars and trucks can be calculated according to the exit capacity of a bottleneck. The analytic expression of multiple vehicle type dynamic marginal cost function is deduced under congested and uncongested conditions. Then a heuristic algorithm is presented in solving multiple vehicle type dynamic queues, tolls under system optimum and user equilibrium conditions. The numerical example illustrates the simplicity and applicability of the proposed approach.