Tiago Pinto

Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto | CISTER · GECAD research group

Artificial intelligence encapsulates a "black box" of undiscovered knowledge, propelling the exploration of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in generative data synthesis and deep learning. Focused on unveiling these "black box" areas, pointed into interpretability and validation in synthetic data generation, shedding light on the intricaci...

The trends of the 21st century are challenging the traditional production process due to the reduction in the life cycle of products and the demand for more complex products in greater quantities. Industry 4.0 (I4.0) was introduced in 2011 and it is recognized as the fourth industrial revolution, with the aim of improving manufacturing processes an...

Virtual assistants offer a new type of solution to handle interaction between human and machine and can be applied in various business contexts such as Industry or Education. When designing and building a virtual assistant the developers must ensure a set of parameters to achieve a good solution. Various platforms and frameworks emerged to allow de...

The increase in renewable generation of a distributed nature has brought significant new challenges to power and energy system management and operation. Self-consumption in buildings is widespread, and with it rises the need for novel, adaptive and intelligent building energy management systems. Although there is already extensive research and deve...

The widespread of distributed renewable energy is leading to an increased need for advanced energy management solutions in buildings. The variability of generation needs to be balanced by consumer flexibility, which needs to be accomplished by keeping the consumption cost as low as possible, while guaranteeing consumer comfort. This paper proposes...

Real Estate Agents perform the tedious job of selecting and filtering pictures of houses manually on a daily basis, in order to choose the most suitable ones for their websites and provide a better description of the properties they are selling. However, this process consumes a lot of time, causing delays in the advertisement of homes and reception...

Dear Colleagues, Not long ago, electricity markets were predominantly occupied by conventional power plants that produce electricity by burning fossil fuels. As the insidious ecological consequences of global warming became evident, governments worldwide decided to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Nowadays, renewable energy technologies are changi...

Information and Communication Technologies are driving the improvement of industrial processes. According to the Industry 4.0 (I4.0) paradigm, digital systems provide real-time information to humans and machines, increasing flexibility and efficiency in production environments. Based on the I4.0 Design Principles concept, Virtual Assistants can pla...

Metaheuristic optimization algorithms are increasingly used to reach near-optimal solutions for complex and large-scale problems that cannot be solved in due time by exact methods. Metaheuristics’ performance is, however, deeply dependent on their effective configuration and fine-tuning to align the algorithm’s search process with the specific char...

Industry 4.0 was publicly introduced in Germany in 2011 and is known as the fourth industrial revolution, whose goal is to improve manufacturing processes and increase the competitiveness of the manufacturing industry. Industry 4.0 uses technological concepts such as Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet of Things and Cloud Computing to create services,...

In recent years, sustainable power supply has become a necessary asset for the daily survival and development of populations. The incentive to the use of renewable energies has been increasing worldwide. Solar energy, in particular, is widespreading fast in countries whose location allows to obtain excellent radiation conditions. In this work, auto...

Renewable energy sources have transformed the electricity market, allowing virtual power players or aggregators to participate and benefit from selling surplus energy. However, meeting demand and ensuring energy production stability can be challenging due to the intermittent nature of renewable sources. Accurate forecasting of energy consumption, g...

Over the years, industrial evolution has proved to be a complex process, since there are several aspects that need to be considered to achieve highly functional processes and differentiated quality products. To date, four industrial revolutions have been implemented. Thus, the paradigm of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) was born, a concept that aims to improve...

In the last 30 years, several academic and commercial projects have explored the context-awareness concept in multiple domains. Ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence are features associated with the 4th generation industry empowering space to interact and respond appropriately according to context. In the scope of Industry 4.0, context-awar...

The structural changes in the energy sector caused by renewable sources and digitization have resulted in an increased use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), including Machine Learning (ML) models. However, these models’ black-box nature and complexity can create issues with transparency and trust, thereby hindering their interpretability. The use of...

This paper proposes a novel approach for the provision of non-frequency ancillary service (AS) by consumers connected to low-voltage distribution networks. The proposed approach considers an asymmetric pool-based local market for AS negotiation, allowing consumers to set a flexibility quantity and desired price to trade. A case study with 98 consum...

The share of renewable generation is growing worldwide, increasing the complexity of the grids operation to maintain its stability and balance. This leads to an increased need for designing new electricity markets (EMs) suited to this new reality. Simulation tools are widely used to experiment and analyze the potential impacts of new solutions, suc...

There is a growing complexity, volatility, and unpredictability in the electric sector that hardens the decision-making process. To this end, the use of proper decision support tools and simulation platforms becomes essential. This paper presents the Multi-Agent based Real-Time INfrastructure for Energy (MARTINE) platform that allows real-time simu...

Due to the rapid development of artificial intelligence, popular Virtual Assistants like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, can be applied to a wide variety of business areas. One area in which Virtual Assistants can be very useful is in Education, specially due to the pandemics that is occurring during the last years, as it can provide to students,...

The use of mobile conversations is increasing all around the world. A conversational agent (CA) is mostly useful due to the fast response times and their simple nature. Recently, we have seen the development and increasing use of dialog systems on the Web. A conversational agent (CA) is a system capable of conversing with a user in natural language...

Artificial intelligence is transforming the way chatbots are created and used. The recent boom of artificial intelligence development is creating a whole new generation of intelligent approaches that enable a more efficient and effective design of chatbots. On the other hand, the increasing need and interest from the industry in artificial intellig...

The rapid developments in Internet‐of‐Things (IoT), cloud computing, and big data technologies have increased the popularity of machine learning (ML) techniques. As a result, of all ML techniques, deep learning (DL) is at the forefront of innovation, outperforming all other techniques in many application domains. DL has made breakthroughs in speech...

The large‐scale integration of electric vehicles (EVs) can contribute to the better use of renewable resources and the emergence of new technologies. However, if not properly controlled, it has several downsides. Several strategies make it possible to perform this control by making use of data mining models to deal with the large amounts of data as...

Data mining approaches are increasingly important to enable dealing with the constantly rising challenges in power and energy systems. Classification models, in particular, are suitable for predicting classes of new observations based on previous cases. This chapter illustrates the advantages of the use of classification models, namely artificial n...

New challenges arise with the upsurge of a Big Data era. Huge volumes of data, from the most varied natures, gathered from different sources, collected in different timings, often with high associated uncertainty, make the decision-making process a harsher task. Current methods are not ready to deal with characteristics of the new problems. This pa...

In the upcoming years, European countries have to make a strong bet on solar energy. Small photovoltaic systems are able to provide energy for several applications like housing, traffic and street lighting, among others. This field is expected to have a big growth, thus taking advantage of the largest renewable energy source existing on the planet,...

Complex optimization problems are often associated to large search spaces and consequent prohibitive execution times in finding the optimal results. This is especially relevant when dealing with dynamic real problems, such as those in the field of power and energy systems. Solving this type of problems requires new models that are able to find near...

The integration of distributed energy resources contributes to accomplishing a balance between the supply and demand inside a local market. The operation of these markets is based on the peer-to-peer negotiations between users, whose cooperation leads to an increase in the social welfare of the community, thus creating a more user-centric market. T...

The growth of renewable energy sources usage at the local level contributes to decentralizing the power and energy systems. Nowadays, there is an increment of residential consumers becoming prosumers able to consume their generation or sell it to the public grid to reduce the electricity bill. This great penetration of electricity compromises the p...

The prosumers flexibility procurement has increased due to the current penetration of distributed and variable renewable energy sources. The prosumers flexibility is often able to quickly adjust the power consumption, making it well suited as a primary and secondary reserve for ancillary services. In the era of smart grids, the role of the aggregat...

This paper proposes a decision support model to define electricity consumers’ remuneration structures when providing consumption flexibility, optimized for different load regimes. The proposed model addresses the remuneration of consumers when participating in demand response programs, benefiting or penalizing those who adjust their consumption whe...

The power quality delivered by the distribution companies to consumers has always been a relevant issue, especially to industrial consumers, where power quality is directly related to productivity [...]

Recent commitments and consequent advances towards an effective energy transition are resulting in promising solutions but also bringing out significant new challenges. Models for energy management at the building and microgrid level are benefiting from new findings in distinct areas such as the internet of things or machine learning. However, the...

Energy consumers are becoming active players in the power and energy system. However, their informed and real-time responsiveness to the variations of renewable-based generation and, consequently, energy prices, is not possible without decision support solutions. This paper proposes a novel contextual learning approach for energy forecasting, which...

This paper presents a novel feed-forward neural network for wind speed forecasting. The electricity sector accounts for a quarter of the world CO2 emissions. To reduce these emissions, several national, regional and global agreements have been signed, setting ambitious goals to increase the penetration of renewable energy sources (RES). Although ac...

In this paper, an open source library for particle swarm optimization is presented, the Pyticle Swarm. This package is capable of performing the optimization for any mathematical problems given an optimization function, the lower and upper limits of variables and a constrains function (optional). Pyticle Swarm library provides the user the possibil...

The higher share of renewable energy sources in the electrical grid and the electrification of significant sectors, such as transport and heating, are imposing a tremendous challenge on the operation of the energy system due to the increase in the complexity, variability and uncertainties associated with these changes. The recent advances of comput...

Electricity markets are complex and dynamic environments with very particular characteristics. Ambitious goals, including those set by the European Union, foster the increased use of distributed generation, essentially based on renewable energy sources. This requires major changes in electricity markets and energy systems, namely through the adopti...

Agent-based simulation tools have found many applications in the field of Power and Energy Systems, as they can model and analyze the complex synergies of dynamic and continuously evolving systems. While some studies have been done w.r.t. simulation and decision support for electricity markets and smart grids, there is still a generalized limitatio...

The significant changes the electricity sector has been suffering in the latest decades increased the complexity and unpredictability of power and energy systems (PES). To deal with such a volatile environment, different software tools are available to simulate, study, test, and support the decisions of the various entities involved in the sector....

The increasing penetration of renewable energy sources and the need to adjust to the future demand requires adopting measures to improve energy resources management, especially in buildings. In this context, PV generation forecast has an essential role in the energy management entities by preventing problems related to intermittent weather conditio...

The share of renewable generation is increasing all around the globe. This is leading to an increased need for designing new electricity markets that are suited to the new reality. Simulation is widely used to experiment and analyze the potential impacts of new solutions, such as novel electricity market designs. This paper presents the Electricity...

The increasing use of renewable energy sources is one of the main causes of the several transformations occurring in the operation and management of power and energy systems. There is a growing complexity, volatility, and unpredictability in the sector that hardens the decision-making process. To this end, the use of proper decision support tools a...

This paper explores the concept of the local energy markets and, in particular, the need for trust and security in the negotiations necessary for this type of market. A multi-agent system is implemented to simulate the local energy market, and a trust model is proposed to evaluate the proposals sent by the participants, based on forecasting mechani...

Building management systems (BMSs) are being implemented broadly by industries in recent decades. However, BMSs focus on specific domains, and when installed on the same building, they lack interoperability to work on a centralized user interface. On the other hand, BMSs interoperability allows the implementation of complex rules based on multi-dom...

Recent changes in the energy sector are increasing the importance of portfolio optimization for market participation. Although the portfolio optimization problem is most popular in finance and economics, it is only recently being subject of study and application in electricity markets. Risk modeling in this domain is, however, being addressed as in...

The participation of household prosumers in wholesale electricity markets is very limited, considering the minimum participation limit imposed by most market participation rules. The generation capacity of households has been increasing since the installation of distributed generation from renewable sources in their facilities brings advantages for...

This paper presents the AiD-EM Ontology, which provides a semantic representation of the concepts required to enable the interoperability between multi-agent-based decision support systems, namely AiD-EM, and the market agents that participate in electricity market simulations. Electricity markets’ constant changes, brought about by the increasing...

This paper explores the aggregation of electricity consumers flexibility. A novel coalitional game theory model for partition function games with non-transferable utility is proposed. This model is used to formalize a game in which electricity consumers find coalitions among themselves in order to trade their consumption flexibility in the electric...

This paper presents MARTINE (Multi-Agent based Real-Time INfrastruture for Energy), a simulation, emulation and energy management platform for the study of problems related to buildings and smart grids. Relevant advances related to buildings and smart grid management and operation have been proposed, focusing either on software models for decision...

A fundamental task for artificial intelligence is learning. Deep Neural Networks have proven to cope perfectly with all learning paradigms, i.e. supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning. Nevertheless, traditional deep learning approaches make use of cloud computing facilities and do not scale well to autonomous agents with low computati...

Overcoming the issues associated with the variability of renewable generation has become a constant challenge in power and energy systems. The use of load flexibility is one of the most promising ways to face it. Suitable ways to incorporate flexibility in the electricity market, in addition to the already challenging integration of distributed gen...

The current energy strategy of the European Union puts the end-user as a key participant in electricity markets. The creation of energy communities has been encouraged by the European Union to increase the penetration of renewable energy and reduce the overall cost of the energy chain. Energy communities are mostly composed of prosumers, which may...

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy trading (ET) is a paradigm of energy trading between consumers without intermediaries. This model of ET allows the commercialization of energy resources produced through renewable sources that do not need other local consumers. This energy trading between consumers is able to improve the local balance of energy generation...

This paper proposes a coalitional game-theoretical model for consumers’ flexibility coalition formation, supported by an optimization model based on differential evolution. Traditionally, the participation in conventional electricity markets used to be limited to large producers and consumers. The final end-users contract their energy supply with r...

Europe and, more particularly, the European Union (EU) has been pursuing ambitious goals in terms of energy, with pioneering energy policy pushing for more clean and affordable energy and highly competitive electricity markets. Electricity market design proved to be a challenge since the first models intended for further competition in the sector h...

Smart grid (SG) technologies are playing a key role in the electric grid transformation, bringing out promising benefits for different actors and empowering customers. However, this transition imposes new challenges concerning the operation and management of energy, particularly at the distribution level of the electric grid. This chapter provides...

The worldwide investment in renewable energy sources is leading to the formation of local energy communities in which users can trade electric energy locally. Regulations and the required enablers for effective transactions in this new context are currently being designed. Hence, the development of software tools to support local transactions is st...

With the implementation of micro grids and smart grids, new business models able to cope with the new opportunities are being developed. Virtual Power Players are a player that allows aggregating a diversity of entities, to facilitate their participation in the electricity markets and to provide a set of new services promoting generation and consum...

This paper explores the concept of the Local Energy Market and, in particular, the need for Trust in the negotiations necessary for this type of market. A multi-agent system is implemented to simulate the Local Energy Market, and a Trust model is proposed to evaluate the proposals sent by the participants, based on forecasting mechanisms that try t...

Currently, there is great interest in reducing the consumption of fossil fuels (and other non-renewable energy sources) in order to preserve the environment; smart buildings are commonly proposed for this purpose as they are capable of producing their own energy and using it optimally. However, at times, solar energy is not able to supply the energ...

This paper presents a study on the impact of adjacent markets on the electricity market, realizing the advantages of acting in several different markets. The increased use of renewable primary sources to generate electricity and new usages of electricity such as electric mobility are contributing to a better and more rational way of living. The inv...

This paper presents three ensemble learning models for short term load forecasting. Machine learning has evolved quickly in recent years, leading to novel and advanced models that are improving the forecasting results in multiple fields. However, in highly dynamic fields such as power and energy systems, dealing with the fast acquisition of large a...

This chapter addresses the topic of bidding strategies, which is essential for market players to enhance their market participation outcomes. It focuses on market analysis and clearing, thus providing the insight on how the market price is calculated and what affects the definition of prices and accepted and refused bids; this is accomplished throu...