While modeling and optimization of desalination systems’ operation have been extensively studied, current approaches are hard-wired to specific designs and performance metrics, without the flexibility to reuse or extend these models. Bridging this gap, reported in this paper is the development of a formal analytic model and a decision guidance system for desalination service networks that can be applied to a broad range of desalination designs and architectures. The model and the system are based on an extensible repository of atomic component models, initially including models for pumps, renewable energy sources, water and power storage, and reverse osmosis units. An experimental study is conducted to demonstrate the flexibility of the model and system, and its scalability to support realistic size problems.

Proposed is a fundamentally new approach to manufacturing as a service based on a market of virtual things: parameterized products and services that can be searched, composed and optimized, while hiding the underlying complexity of product designs and manufacturing service networks. The approach includes bootstrapping the market with novel computational techniques and tools to reuse the distributed wealth of existing product and process designs by generalizing them into models of virtual things. The goal is to catalyze the agility, accessibility and predictability of the manufacturing-entrepreneurship ecosystem, transforming the future of manufacturing.

Many software development projects fail because they do not deliver sufficient business benefit to justify the investment. Existing approaches to estimating business benefit of software development adopt unrealistic assumptions which produce imprecise results. This paper focuses on removing this limitation for software projects that automate business workflow processes. For this class of projects, the paper proposes a new approach and a decision-guidance framework to select and schedule software features over a sequence of software releases as to maximize the net present value of the combined cash flow of software development as well as the improved organizational business workflow. The uniqueness of the proposed approach is in precise modelling of the business workflow processes and the savings achieved by deploying new software functionality.