PhD candidate in Distributed (renewable) energy management

Buildings account for a significant proportion of global energy demand, greenhouse gas emission (GHGE), waste generation and resource demands. Reducing GHGE can be achieved by either switching to low-carbon technologies or reducing the amount of fossil fuel energy consumed. The latter can be achieved by designing intelligent applications based on IT-technologies to efficiently integrate decentralized renewables like photovoltaic (PV) with heat pumps, electromobility, and battery storage units at the household level.

In this PhD thesis, the focus is on investigating a new distributed charging optimization strategy with a shared objective of reducing GHGE under specific constraints, spanning from technological constraints (e.g., storage capacities) to financial (e.g., limited budgets) or social ones (e.g., considering inhabitant habits, agenda…). ADMM-like state-of-the-art techniques will be considered to solve this distributed charging optimization problem. The use of blockchain (Distributed Ledger Technology) technologies for energy trading purposes (as in [Wa21]) will be considered, along with their impact in terms of CO2 emitted (e.g., resulting from mining, incurred transaction fees, etc.) and financial cost (e.g., fee induced by a transaction). The proposed algorithm will be evaluated using publicly available state-of-the-art datasets.

You Will Be Required To Perform The Following Tasks

• Carrying out research in the predefined areas
• Survey the scientific literature in the relevant research domains
• Disseminating results through scientific publications
• Communicate and closely work with the partner to collect requirements and report results
• Implement proof-of-concept software tools