Prof. Zita Vale
Polytechnic of Porto, PortugalArtificial Intelligence-based Models and Applications for Efficient and Sustainable Energy Management in Buildings
Abstract:
The energy industry is undergoing a transition towards a more sustainable energy future. Buildings represent a very significant share of the overall energy consumption and must play a very important role in this energy transition. Buildings already have a significant role in the use of renewable energy sources, but are also increasing their electrical energy demand due to climatization needs and electric mobility. Promoting active roles for building occupants is an opportunity that cannot be missed, as it represents a high potential for gathering the flexibility that power and energy systems urgently needed.
Artificial Intelligence models are needed to enable buildings to have a relevant positive contribution to the energy transition process, ensuring not only adequate approaches for efficient energy use but also bringing a human centric paradigm to the energy business. Artificial Intelligence concepts and methods have a huge potential to bring effective solutions ensuring efficient and sustainable solutions as well as the fair and efficient participation of all the involved actors, including small consumers and energy communities.
Data driven and knowledge-based approaches can ensure the required distributed decision support, planning, and management of the energy resources in the frame of competitive electricity markets. The new approaches must be trusted by their users making explainability and semantics key aspects of Artificial Intelligence-based models and applications to ensure a sustainable and efficient energy future.
Biography:
Zita Vale, IEEE Senior Member, graduated in Electrical Engineering in 1986, received the PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1993, and the Agregação title (Habilitation) in 2003 from the University of Porto, Portugal.
She is Full Professor in the School of Engineering, Polytechnic of Porto. She is a member of the Coordination Board of LASI - The Associated Lab on Intelligent System and leads the research activities on Intelligent Power and Energy Systems at GECAD - Research Group on Intelligent Engineering and Computing for Advanced Innovation and Development.
She has been involved in more than 60 R&D projects and published more than 200 papers in international scientific journals. Her scientific research activities mainly focus on Power and Energy Systems Operation, Electricity Markets, Energy Communities, Demand Response, Renewables, Electric Vehicles, and Distributed Generation and Storage. She has been developing Artificial Intelligence-based models, methods and applications for Power and Energy, using Agents and Multi-Agent systems, Knowledge-Based systems, Semantics, Machine Learning, Data Mining, and Evolutionary Computation.
Zita Vale actively participates in several technical working groups and committees. She is the IEEE PES (Power and Energy Society) Technical Committee Program Chair (TCPC) for Analytic Methods for Power Systems (AMPS) Committee, Chair of the IEEE PES Intelligent Data Analysis and Mining (IDMA) Working Group and of the Open Data Sets (ODS) Task Force. She is the Chair of the Board of Directors of ISAP - Intelligent Systems Application to Power Systems.
She is Editor-in-Chief of Applied Energy journal (Elsevier) and is involved in edition activities for different journals and books. She has regular activity as reviewer and evaluator for papers and for project proposals and monitoring, from different funding agencies around the world.
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