Bastian Lang
Visiting Scholar
Supervisor: Dr. Geoffrey Lewis
School of Environment, Enterprise & Development (SEED)
Bastian Lang is a mechanical engineer pursuing his Ph.D. at the
University of Kassel. He is a research assistant (project engineer) in the Institute for Production Technology and Logistics, department of sustainable products and processes.
Big industrial nations like Canada and Germany have high energy demands and as a result, are also responsible for huge amounts of emissions. Despite the different basic conditions the ambitions of both countries in terms of reducing energy use and emissions are very similar. My study in Canada shows a beginning to achieve these aims. The special idea is the use of an artificial neural net (ANN) to predict the energy consumption of factories. This allows the companies to configure the production plan more efficiently and to buy energy more cheaply. For energy suppliers, this means with a wide market penetration of this technology they know how what their customers' energy demand will be. My work at Waterloo was to enhance the prediction system and to find examples to predict the demand. While here, I did a lot of programming in VB and Matlab and enhanced my statistic analysis system to report the ANN quality. I also made a comparison between German and Canadian companies and their energy demand.
