The application of adjoint sensitivity theory to a liquid fuels supply model

Adjoint sensitivity theory has been applied to a liquid fuels supply model to determine the sensitivity of calculated results to the parameters in the model. The power of the adjoint sensitivity methodology is that it provides, in principle, an efficient means of calculating the sensitivity, dRdx, of any calculated result R to every parameter x in the model. The liquid fuel supply model considered is one of a class of models that may be constructed from the Generalized Equilibrium Modeling System (GEMS) developed at Decision Focus, Inc., Los Altos, California. It is shown that for this class of models the lengthy development effort that is usually associated with applying the adjoint sensitivity methodology can be avoided by using the GEMS program to evaluate the large number of partial derivatives that are needed to apply the methodology.