Positions are located in the Department of Operations at the Faculty of Business and Economics, and require expertise in Operations Research. We also appreciate experience in Industrial Engineering and Data Analytics. This vacancy is part of a large, inter-disciplinary project, HEAVENN (Hydrogen Energy Applications for Valley Environments in Northern Netherlands), involving 31 public and private projects from six European countries. The consortium's call application was supported by over 65 national and international parties from all over the world, including California, Japan and New Zealand. You will work together with dr. Evrim Ursavas, Albert Schrotenboer, prof. dr. Kees Jan Roodbergen and prof. dr. Iris Vis.
The project involves the large-scale production of green hydrogen as a feedstock for industry, storage, transportation and distribution of hydrogen and hydrogen applications in industry, the built environment and the mobility sector. We are looking for PhD candidates to investigate the opportunities and challenges related to energy transition. We focus on the situation where an integrated and systematic view of a hydrogen economy is established from the supply of renewable energy to the end use in industry, mobility and domestic use. This requires the design of an efficient hydrogen network that balances the needs and requirements of producers, distributers, controllers and end-users. The envisioned contributions of the PhD projects are:
• To contribute to the establishment of a framework for the regional scale-up of hydrogen, including renewable energy resource planning and allocation; electrolyser size optimization; the design of infrastructure and storage capacity optimization; design of distribution networks; high volume industrial and mobility applications; design of bunkering locations for mobility for road and water transport
• To identify the optimization challenges of key-interest within the above-mentioned areas
• To develop appropriate Operations Research models and methods to solve the identified optimization challenges. Examples include, but are not limited to: mixed integer programming based decomposition methods for hydrogen network design problems; robust optimization for dynamic power to gas storage policies; optimal or heuristic dynamic decision making (e.g., Reinforcement Learning, Rolling Horizon heuristics) while controlling the different incentives of stakeholders in a hydrogen distribution network or hydrogen market
• To use Operations Research models and methods to assess different scenarios of future hydrogen adaptation by society using input and data provided by partners in the consortium.
For more details about the position and to apply, please visit
https://www.rug.nl/about-us/work-with-us/job-opportunities/?details=00347-02S0007IBP
Application deadline is before 10 February 2020 Dutch local time (CET) .
For information you can contact dr. Evrim Ursavas ( e.ursavas@rug.nl ).