Summary
Sebastian Maier is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London. He joined Imperial in 2013 after working as a visiting researcher on a renewable energy R&D project at PUC-Rio (Brazil) as part of his MSc in Operational Research at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to this he graduated from the Technical University of Vienna with a BSc in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology and was then awarded an MSc in Energy Engineering from the same university (2011). He received his PhD degree from Imperial College London in 2017.
In his PhD research, he had been focusing on infrastructures and how investments into these can be appraised adequately using quantitative analysis and computational optimisation. In particular, he had been developing new optimisation approaches and algorithms for the economic appraisal of complex infrastructure investments, taking into account that their value is frequently influenced by substantial uncertainty surrounding both exogenous and endogenous factors, and driven by much flexibility (or options) with respect to optimal infrastructure delivery. His PhD research was funded by the Grantham Institute and the EIT Climate-KIC.
His current project investigates improved appraisal and decision making approaches and their application in a range of different organisational and investment contexts. More specifically, this ESRC-funded impact project aims at demonstrating how the real options portfolio approach and numerical optimisation algorithms developed by him during his PhD can be applied to a range of practical, relevant infrastructure investment problems of varying type, scope and scale. Activities include joint case studies with various partners in the public sector and industry.
Besides his postdoctoral research, he is interested in applying mathematical techniques and computational optimisation to tackle real-life decision problems that involve decision making under uncertainty. Recent research projects have covered such areas as renewable energy investments and commercialisation, district heating network planning, municipal solid waste management, and public policy analysis. Sebastian's research publications can be found on the tab above and on ResearchGate/Google Scholar.
Selected Publications
Conference
Maier S, Polak J, Gann D, 2015, Appraising a Portfolio of Interdependent Physical and Digital Urban Infrastructure Investments: A Real Options Approach, 19th Annual International Real Options Conference