Contributions to Decision Support Systems, Energy Economics, and Shared Micromobility Research

Abstract

This thesis includes research articles on Decision Support Systems, Energy Informatics, and Economics, Shared Micromobility, and Digital Study Assistance. For many years, established Information Systems (IS) scholars have called for solutionoriented research to address the most pressing problems of climate change. In this context, this thesis summarizes three consecutive research articles that present the multi-year development of a Decision Support System (DSS) for the energy transformation of the building sector. The DSS Nano Energy System Simulator (NESSI) was developed using Design Science Research guidelines and was further field tested and evaluated with stakeholders. In the discipline of Energy Informatics, a research article is presented that provides a morphological box for the classification of real microgrids. Next, a research article is presented that used regression analysis to investigate the influences of factors on residential photovoltaic system prices and revealed spatial price heterogeneity in Germany. Three research articles are outlined in the Shared Micromobility field. The first article uses a multi-year dataset of location data to examine the spatial and temporal use of e-scooters in Berlin. The second article builds on this and quantifies the influences of various factors such as weather, Covid-19 lockdowns, and other socio-economic parameters on the use of three micromobility concepts. The third article uses a web content mining process to collect a large dataset of police reports on e-scooter accidents. It analyzes risk factors as well as accident implications for riders. A research article on the requirements analysis and development of a digital study assistant concludes this thesis. Here, quantitative surveys and qualitative expert interviews are used to collect requirements from higher education institution stakeholders for a digital study assistant. In addition, developing a study assistance prototype is demonstrated and tested in the field.