High-utility pattern mining is an important data mining task having wide applications. It consists of discovering patterns generating a high profit in databases. Recently, the task of high-utility sequential pattern mining has emerged to discover patterns generating a high profit in sequences of customer transactions. However, a well-known limitation of sequential patterns is that they do not p...

The paper presents the research results related to the use of large utility-managed customer datasets for identifying customer trends and variations that may provide insights to the potential for energy efficiency opportunities. The emphasis is residential customers although the results can be applied to other sectors and building types. An approach to guide the statistical analysis and researc...

Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) is the remote collection of consumption data from customer’s utility meters over telecommunications, radio, power line and other links. AMR provides water, electric and gas utility−service companies the opportunities to streamline metering, billing and collection activities, increase operational efficiency and improve customer service. Utility company uses technolo...

We study two major issues in retail inventory management: (1) The optimal set of variants (the assortment problem), that is, how many and which variants should be carried by retailers; and (2) the optimal inventory policy, given a set of variants. It is well known that it is difficult to reach analytically tractable solutions solving these problems because of the randomness in the total market ...

The Supergen HiDEF (Highly Distributed Energy Future) project focuses on possibilities for decentralising five features of energy systems: resources, control, network infrastructure, participation (markets and commercial arrangements) and policy. This paper concentrates on participation, and the practicalities of an ‘active demand side’. It examines four potential means of altering network and ...

In light of the growing relevance of customeroriented business strategies IT investments in the field of Customer Relationship Management have increased considerably. However, firms often could not realize sufficient returns on these IT investments. One major reason for this failure seems to be the lack of appropriate approaches to determine the economic impact of such investments ex ante. Ther...

Active participation of customers in the management of demand, and renewable energy supply, is a critical goal of the Smart Grid vision. However, this is a complex problem with numerous scenarios that are difficult to test in field projects. Rich and scalable simulations are required to develop effective strategies and policies that elicit desirable behavior from customers. We present a versati...

Purpose: To conceptualise, discuss and evaluate an emergent marketing philosophy, “transcendental marketing”, and its application in practice. Design/methodology/approach: A conceptual framework is grounded in the literatures of marketing practice and leadership styles, and refined by reference to two case examples. Findings: There is scope, limited at present but promising in the longer term, ...

An IT service desk provides a Single Point of Contact for the customers and users regarding support requests. The world-wide adoption of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework has also pushed organizations to improve their service desk operations. However, improving the service desk is a serious challenge for many IT service providers. Many government organizations in Finland have started t...