Prof. Mariagrazia Dotoli (IEEE Fellow)
Politecnico di Bari, Bari, Italy

Title: Decision and Control Strategies for Smart Energy Communities.

Abstract: A powerful solution contributing to the digital and green transformation of sustainable cities is represented by smart energy communities. The term ‘smart energy community’ denotes a collection of users (private, public, or mixed) located in a specific reference area, where all stakeholders – such as end-users (e.g., citizens, companies, etc.), market players (e.g., utilities, service providers), practitioners, planners and policy-makers – actively cooperate for the intelligent optimization of energy costs and efficiency using innovative technology to build and operate a sustainable system. While smart energy communities typically encompass various types of energy exchanges, in this talk we focus on electricity, whose share in the world energy consumption is rapidly increasing and is currently at more than 20%. Independently from the implemented architecture, the success of smart electrical energy communities relies on the deployment of suitable decision and control mechanisms that efficiently and widely exploit renewable sources and distributed storage, while enabling the application of measures oriented to cost-effectiveness, sustainability, and reliability. In this context, the talk presents innovative decision and control frameworks, such as game-theoretic methodologies, for smart electrical energy communities composed of heterogenous actors equipped with trading and sharing service-oriented energy systems. The effectiveness of the presented approaches is shown through several examples.

BIO: Mariagrazia Dotoli is a Full Professor in Automation at Politecnico di Bari, Italy, where she is also the Founder and Coordinator of the Italian National PhD Program on Autonomous Systems.
She is the founder and director (2012-) of the Decision&Control Laboratory of Politecnico di Bari and the founder (2012) of Politecnico di Bari spin-off company Innolab S.r.l.
She authored 300+ international publications in automation. Her h-index in Google Scholar equals 49, with 8000+ citations.
Prof. Dotoli is an IEEE Fellow and serves as VP for Membership&Student Activities of IEEE SMCS and AdCom member of IEEE RAS.