Ontology-based economic models for bioenergy and biofuel projects

Bioenergy is a renewable energy generated from biomass, while biofuel is a hydrocarbon fuel that is produced from biomass. Recently, bioenergy and biofuel projects are encouraged and supported by many governments and organizations in various ways such as providing incentives, technical supports, information, and decision support tools. Economic model is one of the decision support tools, which helps to estimate the costs and earnings involved in a project. It is constructed with various elements such as concepts, relations, logics, constants and equations. In current economic models, all the elements are hard coded into some programming code, which makes the model less reusable and extendable. To address the issue, we present an ontology-based economic model in this paper. In particular, we have leveraged the Semantic Web technologies to represent the knowledge about the bioenergy and biofuel economics and inferred the equations and other values required for economic calculations. The case study has been carried out in two of the INTERREG Projects and found promising results.