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Tidal power industry has made significant progress towards commercialization over the past decade. Significant investments from sector leaders, strong technical progress and positive media coverage have established the credibility of this specific renewable energy source. However, its progress is being retarded by operation and maintenance problems, which results in very low operational availability times, as low as 25 %. This paper presents a literature review of the current state of tidal device operators as well as some commercial tidal turbine condition monitoring solutions. Furthermore, an overview is given of the global tidal activity status (tidal energy market size and geography), the key industry activity and the regulations-standards related with tidal energy industry. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to provide a bird’s view of the current status of the tidal power industry to serve as a roadmap for the academia regarding the real needs of the tidal power industry.

This paper deals with the specification of a Decision Support System (DSS) that has to manage the flow of goods and the business transactions between a port and a dry port. The paper investigates the case of the broader area of Trieste port and specifies the DSS that manages the import flows of freights between dry port and seaport. An integrated approach is designed for the tactical level decision strategy based on simulation optimization, where metaheuristic algorithms are applied.

This paper specifies a Decision Support System (DSS) devoted to manage Intermodal Transportation Networks (ITN). With the aim to support decision makers in the management of the complex processes in the ITN, we describe the architecture of a DSS and its main components. In order to obtain a generic DSS, we employ the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to describe the components and the architecture of the DSS and we apply the solutions based on Service Oriented Architecture, the simulation drivers and window services.

In this work we introduce the combinatory use of Harmony Search (HS) with Optimal Computing Budget Allocation (OCBA) as a means to tackle noisy optimization situations as those that occur during the execution of Discrete Event Systems (DES) for modeling complex systems. The OCBA procedure is employed for the exclusion of the worst harmony during the memory updating process in order to minimize the computational cost and at the same time retain a pool of promising solutions. The proposed hybrid approach is tested on real valued test functions as a proof of concept and the results are promising in case of small computational budgets.