دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تجسم داده ها برای ارزیابی پتانسیل تجاری سازی سوخت زیستی در چارچوب هوش تجاری - الزویر 2018

Abstract

With the ever-increasing energy demand, triggered by the continued population growth and accelerated industrial revolution, renewable energy has emerged as the world's fastest-growing energy source. Renewable energy’s popularity has grown because it is environmentally friendly and abundant in natural environments. Despite its enormous potential as a viable alternative to traditional (fossil fuel-based) energy sources, renewable energy has rarely been commercialized and utilized. Its lack of commercialization has something to do with a lack of evidence proving its eco- and cost-efficiency. With this in mind, this paper aims to assess the eco- and costefficiency of renewable energy such as algae-based biofuels using data visualization. It also intends to help increase public awareness and facilitate the commercialization of renewable energy such as biofuels. Through experiments, this paper found that the success of biofuel commercialization hinged on temperature, light intensity, and algae strain. Another important finding is that the low carbon footprint resulting from biofuel consumption may not directly contribute to the immediate revenue growth of a biofuel producing company, but it can foster a long-term positive image that will help attract more customers in the future with increased brand recognition. Furthermore, this paper evaluates the effectiveness, the level of user involvement, and the usability of two data visualization tools built upon the dashboard and the balanced scorecard. Based on the case study, this paper demonstrates how effective and useful the tools are in communicating the firm’s strategic goals toward sustainability and thus provides easier practical guidelines for renewable energy development decisions.

5. Concluding Remarks and Future Research Directions

The cost and volume of algae-based biofuel is significant, since they can dictate the success of biofuel commercialization. Such success often hinges on various influential factors such as temperature, light intensity, and algae strain. Since each step of biofuel production poses unique challenges, performance monitoring systems are needed. As such, this paper proposed both dashboards and BSC as a way of systematically monitoring and evaluating the biofuel production process. Additionally, the strategy map was developed to visualize the biofuel production and commercialization strategy from different perspectives under varying environmental factors. To verify the usefulness and practicality of the proposed data visualization tools (i.e., dashboards, BSC, and the strategy map), this paper developed their prototypes using the SAP software.

5.1 Main Contributions

One of the main contributions of this research is the development of a comprehensive list of financial and non-financial key performance indicators with an actionable data dictionary relevant to the success of algae-based biofuel commercialization that can be easily adopted with little to no modifications. Specifically, this research is one of the first to develop specific performance metrics and data visualization techniques for gauging the commercialization potential of biofuel alternatives based on algae nurturing. Contrary to the traditional performance evaluation, the proposed metrics, based on both dashboards and BSC, shed light on four different perspectives (i.e., financial, internal process, innovation, and sustainability) of biofuel creation.