Estimation of technical efficiency is widely used in empirical research using both cross-sectional and panel data. Although several stochastic frontier models for panel data are available, only a few of them are normally applied in empirical research. In this article we chose a broad selection...

Agriculture and agricultural policy in Finland and Norway have shared many common features in the past, except that Finland joined the European Union in 1995. In this article, we examine profitability and productivity dynamics in Finnish and Norwegian farms during the period 1991 to 2008. Our...

Quota regulations that prevent output expansion of farms and reallocation of output between farms can cause lower growth in output and productivity. The aim of this study was to explain the output growth rate of Norwegian dairy farms since 1976, and to decompose it into output, input,...

A data-driven approach to optimize the total energy consumption of the HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) system in a typical office facility is presented. A multi-layer perceptron ensemble is selected to build the total energy model integrating three indoor air quality models,...

A data-driven approach for optimizing the reheat process in a variable-air-volume box is presented. Data-mining algorithms derive temporal predictive models from the reheat process data. The bi-objective model formed is solved with a modified particle swarm optimization algorithm. To increase...

In this paper, a two-mode ventilation control of a single facility is formulated as a scheduling model over multiple time horizons. Using the CO2 concentration as the major indoor air quality index and expected room occupancy schedule, optimal solutions leading to reduced CO2 concentration and...

A data-driven optimization approach for minimization of the cooling output of an air handling unit (AHU) is presented. The models used in this research are built with data mining algorithms. The performance of dynamic models build by four different data mining algorithms is studied. A model...

A data-driven approach for minimization of the energy to air condition a typical office-type facility is presented. Eight data-mining algorithms are applied to model the nonlinear relationship among energy consumption, control settings (supply air temperature and supply air static pressure), and...