The Bulletin of the Polish Academy of Sciences: Technical Sciences (Bull.Pol. Ac.: Tech.) is published bimonthly by the Division IV Engineering Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, since the beginning of the existence of the PAS in 1952. The journal is peer‐reviewed and is published both in printed and electronic form. It is established for the publication of original high quality papers from multidisciplinary Engineering sciences with the following topics preferred: Artificial and Computational Intelligence, Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology, Civil Engineering, Control, Informatics and Robotics, Electronics, Telecommunication and Optoelectronics, Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, Thermodynamics, Material Science and Nanotechnology, Power Systems and Power Electronics.

Journal Metrics: JCR Impact Factor 2018: 1.361, 5 Year Impact Factor: 1.323, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) 2017: 0.319, Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) 2017: 1.005, CiteScore 2017: 1.27, The Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education 2017: 25 points.

Abbreviations/Acronym: Journal citation: Bull. Pol. Ac.: Tech., ISO: Bull. Pol. Acad. Sci.-Tech. Sci., JCR Abbrev: B POL ACAD SCI-TECH Acronym in the Editorial System: BPASTS.

The economic downturn in Europe and in the world, has affected the traditional branches of industry in a particular way. Development plans of domestic coke plants in terms of main production assets for the next years have been presented. Taking into account the current market situation, the coke plants strategy should aim at risk minimization through application of already known technologies. On the other hand, investments in scope of new and innovative technologies which are connected with a high level of variability, should be seen as an opportunity. Thus, evaluation of investment projects should be done in a different way than so far. The traditional discount analysis, because of its static nature, does not take into account variability and options included in projects with many decision moments - it can prove to be not sufficient. A tool which helps the decision makers in such situations, is the real options analysis. The article presents the findings of the research-development project on coal blend pre-drying implementation, realized by Zdzieszowice Coke Plant and ICHPW in Zabrze. The results achieved so far, as well as the concerns resulting from the project, have been discussed in this article. Further project development plans, aiming at the construction of a semi industrial research installation for analysing the impact of pre-drying on the coke making process have been presented. The article describes premises for the application of real options analysis as a tool to evaluate projects, the results of which are uncertain. The origin and structure of real options as well as the conditions of their application compared to traditional, discount based project evaluation methods, have been presented. The origin and characteristic parameters of real options have been discussed. In the next part, by applying the NPV and real options method, the research-development undertaking of coal blend pre-drying implementation on two coke batteries, has been evaluated. In order to assess the real option's value of the project, which is a classic European call option, the Black-Scholes formula has been used. The achieved results have been compared as well as the flexibility rate of the analyzed research-development project has been defined.