STEVFNs-P: SIMTech Web Application For Corporate Sustainability

Project Roadmap

Empathize

How might we enable companies to accurately and transparently report Scope 3 emissions, preserving supplier confidentiality and providing optimised data-secure decarbonization strategies?

Key challenges in ESG reporting:

Obtain accurate and reliable data without disclosing sensitive information.
Derive cost-optimized, actionable de-carbonization plans (this process is time-consuming and requires high expertise).
Static reports require long turnaround times and slow down decision-making.

Define

In Singapore, mandatory Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting for Scope 1 and 2 emissions will begin for all listed companies by 2025, expanding progressively to larger companies. By 2029, reporting requirements will include Scope 3 emissions too.

Governments globally recognize that Scope 3 emissions often represent a significant portion of a company’s total greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint & play a critical role in achieving broader climate targets. Hence, there is an increasing push—via both encouragement & regulation —for corporations to disclose these indirect emissions.

Solution

Our web application, STEVFNs-P, integrates various energy sources, managing energy flows across extensive networks and optimizing energy storage and distribution to maximize efficiency and sustainability.

STEVFNs is accessible to a broader audience, including those with limited technical expertise in energy systems. This application allows users to visually design, analyze, and optimize energy networks, facilitating a deeper understanding of energy systems and their potential for sustainability and efficiency improvements.

Key challenges in ESG reporting:

Obtain accurate and reliable data without disclosing sensitive information.
Derive cost-optimized, actionable de-carbonization plans (this process is time-consuming and requires high expertise).
Static reports require long turnaround times and slow down decision-making

How STEVFNs-P addressed this:

ESG Digital Twin > STEVFNs-P uses a user-friendly digital twin that allows organizations and suppliers to easily enter and manage emissions data. Pre-built templates and models reduce complexity, shorten implementation time, and minimize the expertise required to gather accurate Scope 3 information.
Confidentiality Preservation > STEVFNs-P only requires non-sensitive information at each step, ensuring that suppliers do not have to disclose proprietary details. This cascading approach allows data to be shared securely with the necessary stakeholders, preserving privacy while still providing a comprehensive view of the supply chain.
Actionable Insights > STEVFNs-P provides a real-time dashboard that compiles Scope 3 data from the entire supply chain. With tracking, projections, and dynamic trade-off analysis, companies can identify cost-effective decarbonization strategies, streamline reporting, and meet compliance requirements more efficiently.

Key Features of Our Solution

This web-application consists of three platforms. The asset modeler platform, system modeller platform, and data visualization platform. Organizations can then use these platforms in STEVFNs-P to obtain the cost-effective strategy to reduce emissions across the entire supply chain.

Asset Modeler

System Modeler

Data Visualiser

Enables organizations to precisely model their individual supply, demand & transport assets in modular segments.

This platform is grounded in the refined theoretical framework of STEVFNs-P, allowing for flexible, efficient & accurate modeling of each asset’s life cycle & environmental impact.

Allows organizations to visualize & optimize their entire supply chains comprehensively & securely engage their suppliers, prompting recursive modeling of each supplier’s own system.

The platform also maintains strict confidentiality, allowing organisations to ping others who play a part in their supply chain to model their systems, while assets & sensitive data from different companies remain hidden, preventing potential conflicts of interest or exposure of proprietary information.

Provides interactive dashboards that dynamically visualize critical metrics such as emissions and costs.

This intuitive & accessible interface helps organizations clearly understand their environmental impacts, track progress toward ESG targets, & identify areas for further optimization & sustainability improvement.

How we built STEVFNs

The web application is divided into two main parts: the user interface (the user-facing architecture) and the optimization back-end (the STEVFNs Microservice). The user-facing architecture consists of the modelling platforms while the back-end is responsible for finding the least cost emission pathways of the LCA. The optimization back-end formulates the input into a convex optimization problem and invokes a solver to solve the problem. It then outputs results produced on the data-visualization platform that the user can utilize to visualize.

Benefits

Companies:

Scalable, cost-efficient, and high-performance energy optimization framework to model complex energy systems
Future-proof their energy solutions with a flexible, extensible architecture built for evolving demands in energy system design and deployment

Lower costs, faster development, better optimization, and greater adaptability tailored to real-world energy challenges

Consumers:

Mindful and sustainable consumption of products
Reduced carbon footprint ⟶ less impact on global warming

Environmentally-friendly consumption supporting a sustainable future

In partnership with :

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our deepest gratitude to Dr. Aniq Ahsan, whose groundbreaking theoretical contributions to Space-Time Energy Vector Flow Networks (STEVFNs) laid the foundation for this project. His insights and guidance have been instrumental in enhancing the theoretical aspects of our work and addressing the complex challenges of modeling energy systems.

We are also profoundly thankful to our Capstone mentors, whose expertise and support have been invaluable throughout this journey. Their constructive feedback, encouragement, and guidance in both technical and strategic areas have significantly shaped the direction and outcomes of this project.

Lastly, we extend our appreciation to SIMTech A*STAR for providing the platform and resources necessary to start our project. This project would not have been possible without the collective efforts and collaboration of everyone involved.