(54e) Towards Sustainable Bioenergy: Architecture for a Shared Environment for Collaboration

The national bioenergy infrastructure is an essential component of the national energy infrastructure, and the Department of Energy (Office of Biomass Program) has the important responsibility to assure reliable generation and supply of bioenergy to meet the national bioenergy goals. The functions and operations of the bioenergy infrastructure components and their dependencies on other critical infrastructures, such as agriculture and transportation, across multiple space and time scales can not be addressed by a single model or tool. The Bioenergy Knowledge Discovery Framework (KDF), an integrated collaboration and decision support environment, is being developed where data, modeling and visualization tools can be shared by multiple stakeholders to understand, design, and develop efficient local and regional practices for the bioenergy infrastructure that can be guided with strategic policy decisions to ensure national bioenergy assurance. In particular, the Bioenergy KDF will provide decision support to a variety of stake holders for addressing evolving issues such as the interactions of the biofuel industry with other critical infrastructures; evaluate the environmental and socio-economic impacts of a growing biofuel industry based on future scenarios for biofuel production. The Bioenergy KDF will also facilitate assessment, design, implementation, and adoption of biomass based energy generation and delivery network that provides reliable and cost effective biofuel for transportation. This presentation will illustrate the design and development of the Bioenergy KDF that integrates, from distributed archives, bioenergy infrastructure related data, models, and tools developed by government, academic, and private sector partners.