Turning electric vehicles into profitable virtual power plants

Wolfgang Ketter is a Professor of Next Generation Information Systems at the Department of Technology and Operations Management at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. Wolf Ketter is also Chaired Professor of Information Systems at the Faculty of Management, Economics, and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany (since 2017). He also serves as the Director of the Institute of Energy Economics at the University of Cologne (EWI). In addition, he is Chaired Professor and Director of the Erasmus Centre for Future Energy Business  at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.  In 2007, he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, USA, and started as an Assistant Professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, NL, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2011 (early tenure), and was named Full Professor in July 2013. This was one of the fastest promotions at a top university worldwide. He is the founder and director of the Learning Agents Group at Erasmus, the Erasmus Centre for Future Energy Business, and the Chair of the annual Erasmus Energy Forum. He was the president of the Association for Trading Agent Research (ATAR, 2010-2015). ATAR organizes the annual Trading Agent Competition (TAC), such as Power TAC.  Wolf Ketter’s research explores solutions to the wicked problems of sustainability by exploiting rapidly evolving computing power and techniques to build and explore new solutions that could not be thought of before. Traditionally, research in business and social environments is built over time, as researchers pick interesting and promising ideas and build a body of research over decades. Ketter is changing this paradigm by building a community of researchers who compete and learn from each other through a process called “Competitive Benchmarking,” which uses simulation models and a continuous stakeholder-driven alignment process to bring focus to the most important features of real-world challenges. For example, Power TAC models important aspects of future sustainable energy markets. Ketter’s research is taking the next step of building a community of researchers that will bring about a leapfrogging of research progress.   Wolf Ketter is one of the world's foremost experts in economics-based design of technology artifacts and practical sustainable smart markets. He has served as general chair or program chair of more than 20 international conferences and workshops. His research has been published in various top information systems and computer science journals such as AI Magazine, Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Energy Economics, Energy Policy, European Journal of Information Systems, Information Systems Research (ISR), International Journal of Electronic Commerce, Machine Learning, MIS Quarterly (MISQ), Management Science, as well as 150 papers in major international conferences.  He has supervised over 10 Ph.D. students and has made fundamental theoretical, empirical, experimental, algorithmic and artifact design contributions to the fields of Information Systems (IS), Machine Learning, Energy Economics and Policy, Computer Science, and Management Science. He serves on the editorial boards of ISR and MISQ, the two top IS journals worldwide. In 2012 he won the prestigious INFORMS ISS Design Science Award and in 2013 he won the runner-up award for the best European IS research paper of the year; awarded jointly by the Association of Information Systems and top European CIOs as the most innovative and commercially applicable research. In 2013 he also won the highly competitive Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM) Top Article Award, and in 2014 the ERIM Impact Award for highly influential research on business and society. You can follow Wolf's activities on Twitter (@wolfketter).