Ionut Anghel

Universitatea Tehnica Cluj-Napoca | UT Cluj · Department of Computer Science

Edge computing promising a vision of processing data close to its generation point, reducing latency and bandwidth usage compared with traditional cloud computing architectures, has attracted significant attention lately. The integration of edge computing in modern systems takes advantage of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and can potentially impr...

Heart failure is the leading reason for seniors being admitted to hospitals. Over half of the elderly individuals diagnosed with heart failure find themselves readmitted to hospitals within a span of six months. This recurrence is associated with inadequate adherence to medical treatment and recommendations, underscoring the necessity for support s...

As IoT metering devices become increasingly prevalent, the smart energy grid encounters challenges associated with the transmission of large volumes of data affecting the latency of control services and the secure delivery of energy. Offloading computational work towards the edge is a viable option; however, effectively coordinating service executi...

The management of decentralized energy resources and smart grids needs novel data-driven low-latency applications and services to improve resilience and responsiveness and ensure closer to real-time control. However, the large-scale integration of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has led to the generation of significant amounts of data at the edge...

Economic and policy factors are driving the continuous increase in the adoption and usage of electrical vehicles (EVs). However, despite being a cleaner alternative to combustion engine vehicles, EVs have negative impacts on the lifespan of microgrid equipment and energy balance due to increased power demands and the timing of their usage. In our v...

Within energy communities, the prosumers can engage in peer-to-peer trading, fostering local collaborations and increasing awareness about energy usage and flexible consumption. However, even under these favorable technological and organizational mechanisms, prosumer engagement levels remain low, requiring trading mechanisms that are aligned with t...

Cognitive decline represents a significant public health concern due to its severe implications on memory and general health. Early detection is crucial to initiate timely interventions and improve patient outcomes. However, traditional diagnosis methods often rely on personal interpretations or biases, may not detect the early stages of cognitive...

Blockchain and tokens are relatively new research areas insufficiently explored from both technical and economic perspectives. Even though tokens provide benefits such as easier market access, increased liquidity, lower transaction costs, and automated transactional process, their valuation and price determination are still challenging due to facto...

Blockchain technology offers great value in terms of decentralization, data integrity, transparency, and traceability, however the transactional data is public, and accessible raising concerns about violating privacy regulations. For example, in the peer-to-peer energy trading and demand response use cases, the data stored in blockchain may allow a...

Lately, the energy communities have gained a lot of attention as they have the potential to significantly contribute to the resilience and flexibility of the energy system, facilitating widespread integration of intermittent renewable energy sources. Within these communities the prosumers can engage in peer-to-peer trading, fostering local collabor...

The shift towards renewable energy integration into smart grids has led to complex management processes, which require finer-grained energy and heat generation/ demand forecasting while considering data from monitoring devices and the integration of smaller multi-energy sub-systems at the community, district, or buildings level. However, energy pre...

To ensure the success of energy transition and achieve the target of reducing the carbon footprint of energy systems, the management of energy systems needs to be decentralized. Public blockchains offer favorable features to support energy sector democratization and reinforce citizens’ trust, such as tamper-proof energy data registration and sharin...

p>The small-scale prosumers' decentralized cooperation and aggregation in energy communities are essential to increase renewable energy penetration and to ensure a successful energy transition. Despite their potential small-scale prosumers are not motivated to participate in local energy value chains due to a lack of trust and decentralized coopera...

p>The small-scale prosumers' decentralized cooperation and aggregation in energy communities are essential to increase renewable energy penetration and to ensure a successful energy transition. Despite their potential small-scale prosumers are not motivated to participate in local energy value chains due to a lack of trust and decentralized coopera...

The household prosumers’ decentralized cooperation and aggregation in energy communities are essential to increase renewable energy penetration and to ensure a successful energy transition. Despite their potential, the prosumers are not motivated to participate in local energy value chains due to the lack of trust and decentralized cooperation mode...

The participation of prosumers in demand-response programs is essential for the success of demand-side management in renewable-powered energy grids. Unfortunately, the engagement is still low due to concerns related to the privacy of their energy data used in the prediction processes. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based distributed federat...

The management of renewable-powered smart grids deals with nonlinear optimization problems featuring a variety of linear or nonlinear constraints, discrete or continuous optimization variables, involving high dimensionality of the solution space, and strict time requirements to identify the optimal or near-optimal solution. One promising approach f...

A person’s routine is a sequence of activities of daily living patterns recurrently performed. Sticking daily routines is a great tool to support the care of persons with dementia, and older adults in general, who are living in their homes, and also being useful for caregivers. As state-of-the-art tools based on self-reporting are subjective and re...

The trending techniques for managing indoor and outdoor intelligent environments rely heavily on data acquisition through a diversity of heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) devices and sensors [...]

The monitoring of the daily life activities routine is beneficial, especially in old age. It can provide relevant information on the person’s health state and wellbeing and can help identify deviations that signal care deterioration or incidents that require intervention. Existing approaches consider the daily routine as a rather strict sequence of...

The transition toward decentralized renewable energy transforms the energy grid, with the prosumers playing an active role in the local energy management. Accurate day-ahead prediction of their energy demand is a prerequisite to ensure the stability and efficiency of the power grid by balancing the energy demand with the production, while incorpora...

The adoption of remote assisted care was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This type of system acquires data from various sensors, runs analytics to understand people’s activities, behavior, and living problems, and disseminates information with healthcare stakeholders to support timely follow-up and intervention. Blockchain technology may offe...

Virtual power plants (VPPs) are promising solutions to address the decarbonization and energy efficiency goals in the smart energy grid. They assume the coordination of local energy resources such as energy generation, storage, and consumption. They are used to tackle problems brought by the stochastic nature of renewable energy, lack of energy sto...

As the population in the Western world is rapidly aging, the remote monitoring solutions integrated into the living environment of seniors have the potential to reduce the care burden helping them to self-manage problems associated with old age. The daily routine is considered a useful tool for addressing age-related problems having additional bene...

The classification of the daily living activities (DLAs) is a challenging research topic as the analysis of the DLAs data can help to improve the general health condition of the monitored subjects, to identify patterns that indicate various types of diseases such as the Alzheimer’s disease and to prevent the falls caused by the poor health conditio...

In this paper, we address the digitization of physical assets using blockchain technology focusing on energy and peer-to-peer trading on decentralized energy markets. Because they are forward markets and operate on a day-ahead timeline, the energy transactions are settled only at the movement of energy delivery. Having the option of locking the ene...

Large-scale deployment of renewable energy sources brings new challenges for smart grid management requiring the development of decentralized solutions and active participation of prosumer and non-grid-owned assets. Local energy flexibility markets can help in monitoring energy flows, motivate changes in prosumers’ energy supply and demand, achievi...

In this paper, we address the digitization of physical assets using blockchain technology focusing on energy and peer-to-peer trading on decentralized energy markets. Because they are forward markets and operate on a day-ahead timeline, the energy transactions are settled only at the movement of energy delivery. Having the option of locking the ene...

Digitalization, analysis and optimization of discrete manufacturing processes represent a research challenge because the data generated by the sensors that monitor the manufacturing processes are characterized by noise, missing values, many features due to the fact that the assembly processes involve many different assembly steps and often the reso...

Data Centres are large consumers of energy and as the complexity of their applications increases energy awareness and data-driven optimization tools are needed to improve the energy efficiency by enacting their coordinated operation and optimal integration within the smart energy grids. We have proposed a semantically enhanced data model for repres...

Based on scientific studies, heart failure is the principal cause of hospitalization among seniors. More than 50% of elderly with heart failure are readmitted to hospital within six months. Readmission is linked with poor compliance with medical treatment and recommendations, emphasizing the need for a tool to help seniors better comply with post-d...

Data centers consume lots of energy to execute their computational workload and generate heat that is mostly wasted. In this paper, we address this problem by considering heat reuse in the case of a distributed data center that features IT equipment (i.e., servers) installed in residential homes to be used as a primary source of heat. We propose a...

The Digital Twins offer promising solutions for smart grid challenges related to the optimal operation, management, and control of energy assets, for safe and reliable distribution of energy. These challenges are more pressing nowadays than ever due to the large-scale adoption of distributed renewable resources at the edge of the grid. The digital...

In the context of COVID-19 pandemic, the rapid roll-out of a vaccine and the implementation of a worldwide immunization campaign is critical, but its success will depend on the availability of an operational and transparent distribution chain that can be audited by all relevant stakeholders. In this paper, we discuss how blockchain technology can h...

The Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) provides an infrastructure for developing decentralized applications with no central authority for registering, sharing, and synchronizing transactions on digital assets. In the last years, it has drawn high interest from the academic community, technology developers, and startups mostly by the advent of its...

The deployment of small-scale renewable energy sources will transform the management of energy grids towards more decentralized solutions in which the prosumers will have a more active role. Regulatory and market barriers are driving the implementation of virtual aggregation models in which the small-scale prosumers work together on a larger scale...

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rapid roll-out of a vaccine and the implementation of a worldwide immunization campaign is critical, but its success will depend on the availability of an operational and transparent distribution chain that can be audited by all relevant stakeholders. In this paper, we discuss how blockchain technology c...

Decentralized management and coordination of energy systems are emerging trends facilitated by the uptake of the Internet of Things and Blockchain offering new opportunities for more secure, resilient, and efficient energy distribution. Even though the use of distributed ledger technology in the energy domain is promising, the development of decent...

Decentralized management and coordination of energy systems are emerging trends facilitated by the uptake of the Internet of Things and Blockchain offering new opportunities for more secure, resilient, and efficient energy distribution. Even though the use of distributed ledger technology in the energy domain is promising, the development of decent...

The aim of this paper is to present a novel indoor human activity recognition system designated for ambient assisted living environments. To overcome the drawbacks of current solutions in terms of equipment costs and computational complexity, we propose a simple yet robust activity recognition system that combines the output of an activity classifi...

In this paper, we address the management of Data Centers (DCs) by considering their optimal integration with the electrical, thermal, and IT (Information Technology) networks helping them to meet sustainability objectives and gain primary energy savings. Innovative scenarios are defined for exploiting the DCs electrical, thermal, and workload flexi...

This paper addresses the problem of the traditional online auctions by proposing an Ethereum based implementation for three of the most popular auctions: English, Dutch, First-price sealed-bid (FPSB). Such centralized systems are subjects to malicious attacks, unreliable third-party for payment module or repudiation of bids. We present a set of pro...

Nowadays, the medical domain is suffering from a lack of transparency, security, and immutability. Developing a decentralized application based on blockchain technology can be helpful in achieving the requirements that will solve the identified problems. This paper proposes a blockchain-based solution for managing the waiting list for a transplant...

This paper addresses the issue of performing physiotherapy treatments remote, at home, by proposing a personal coaching system capable of surveilling the correctness of the exercises and the adherence to the rehabilitation program established by doctors. For identifying the performed exercises, we use a Microsoft Kinect Sensor on top of which we ha...

Nowadays, the adoption of demand response programs is still lagging due to the prosumers' lack of awareness, fear of losing control and privacy of energy data, etc. Programs decentralization, by adopting promising technologies such as blockchain, may bring significant advantages in terms of transparency, openness, improved control, and increased ac...

Faults detection in semiconductor manufacturing processes is a challenging research problem because the manufacturing processes are characterized by hundreds of different types of operations and the identification of those operations that lead to faults in the final products is very challenging. The existence of faults during the manufacturing proc...

The world is facing major societal challenges because of an aging population that is putting increasing pressure on the sustainability of care. While demand for care and social services is steadily increasing, the supply is constrained by the decreasing workforce. The development of smart, physical, social and age-friendly environments is identifie...

In this chapter we address the smart energy grid decentralization problem by proposing a blockchain‐based energy market allowing the energy to be traded among prosumers in a peer‐to‐peer fashion. We discuss how the blockchain technology could facilitate implementation in such a market, allowing the transformation of energy into a digital asset whic...

Blockchain or Distributed Ledger Technology is a disruptive technology that provides the infrastructure for developing decentralized applications enabling the implementation of novel business models even in traditionally centralized domains. In the last years it has drawn high interest from the academic community, technology developers and startups...

Daily living activities (DLAs) classification using data collected from wearable monitoring sensors is very challenging due to the imbalance characteristics of the monitored data. A major research challenge is to determine the best combination of features that returns the best accuracy results using minimal computational resources, when the data is...

In this paper, we address the problem of the efficient and sustainable operation of data centers (DCs) from the perspective of their optimal integration with the local energy grid through active participation in demand response (DR) programs. For DCs’ successful participation in such programs and for minimizing the risks for their core business pro...

The aim of this paper is to present a novel energy consumption forecasting solution for predicting energy demand at the level of residential buildings based on their historical consumption profile for a seamless integration with the session based Energy Markets developed within Smart Energy Grids that integrate renewable energy sources. To overcome...

Nowadays, centralized energy grid systems are transitioning towards more decentralized systems driven by the need for efficient local integration of new deployed small scale renewable energy sources. The high limits for accessing the energy markets and also for the delivery of ancillary services act as a barrier for small scale prosumers participat...