C. Baghelai et al., UNCERTAINTY IN THE NATIONAL ENERGY MODELING SYSTEM .1. METHOD DEVELOPMENT, Journal of energy engineering, 121(3), 1995, pp. 108-124
This work documents a major part of a large effort to characterize the
uncertainty present in key elements of the U.S. Department of Energy'
s new National Energy Modeling System (NEMS). It is expected that NEMS
will be used to estimate the impact that Federal policy initiatives,
such as taxes, subsidies, and regulations, will have on energy markets
well into the 21st century. But, the effective use of NEMS requires t
hat the uncertainties in its predictions be well understood. So, the E
nergy Information Administration, the Washington Consulting Group, and
the School of Information Technology and Engineering of George Mason
University collaborated on the development and testing of methods for
quantifying uncertainty in the three most important NEMS submodel type
s, namely, linear-optimization, econometric, and heuristic or balance
equations. We constructed assessment procedures for each of these clas
ses, and used them on the Energy Information Administration transporta
tion sector demand model, petroleum market model, and electricity fuel
dispatch model. The methods used include special sampling procedures
applied to computer-based experiments, response surface techniques, an
d Taylor series methods, and they are described in this first of a two
-part paper on the complete study. The important numerical results of
our experiments and their subsequent analyses are presented in the com
panion paper.