Abstract
The environmental impact and the scarcity of limited fossil fuels led to the need of investment in energy based on renewable sources. This has driven Europe to implement several policies that changed the energy market's paradigm, namely the incentive to microgeneration. The penetration of energy sources from intermittent nature has increased the unpredictability of the system, which makes simulation and analysis tools essential in order to provide decision support to entities in this sector. This paper presents the Tools Control Center (TOOCC) as a solution to increase the interoperability between heterogeneous agent-based systems, in the energy field. The proposed approach acts as a facilitator in the interaction between different systems through the usage of ontologies, allowing them to communicate in the same language. To understand the real applicability of this tool, a case study is presented concerning the interaction between several systems, with the purpose of enabling the energy resource scheduling of a microgrid, and the reaction of a house managed by a house management system.

Abstract
Power systems are showing a dynamic evolution in the last few years, caused in part by the adoption of smart grid technologies. The integration of new elements that represent a source of uncertainty, such as renewables generation, electric vehicles, variable loads and electricity markets, poses a higher degree of complexity causing that traditional mathematical formulations struggle in finding efficient solutions to problems in the smart grid context. In some situations, where traditional approaches fail, computational intelligence has demonstrated being a very powerful tool for solving optimization problems. In this paper, we analyze the application of Differential Evolution (DE) to address an energy resource management problem under uncertain environments. We perform a systematic parameter tuning to determine the best set of parameters of four state-of-the-art DE strategies. Having knowledge of the sensitivity of DE to the parameter selection, self-adaptive parameter control DE algorithms are also implemented, showing that competitive results can be achieved without the application of parameter tuning methodologies. Finally, a new hybrid-adaptive DE algorithm, HyDE, which uses a new 'DE/target - to - perturbed-best/1' strategy and an adaptive control parameter mechanism, is proposed to solve the problem. Results show that DE strategies with fixed parameters, despite very sensitive to the setting, can find better solutions than some adaptive DE versions. Overall, our HyDE algorithm excelled all the other tested algorithms, proving its effectiveness solving a smart grid application under uncertainty. © 2018 IEEE.

Abstract
The integration of renewable generation and electric vehicles (EVs) into smart grids poses an additional challenge to the stochastic energy resource management problem due to the uncertainty related to weather forecast and EVs user-behavior. Moreover, when electricity markets are considered, market price variations cannot be disregarded. In this paper, a two-stage stochastic programming approach to schedule the day-ahead operation of energy resources in smart grids under uncertainty is presented. A realistic case study is performed using a large-scale scenario with nearly 4 million variables with the goal to minimize expected operation cost of energy aggregators. Three scenarios are analyzed to understand the effect of market transactions and external suppliers on the aggregator model. The results suggest that the market transactions can reduce expected cost, while the external supplier offers risk-free price. In addition, the performance metric shows the superiority of the stochastic approach over an equivalent deterministic model. © 2018 Power Systems Computation Conference.

Abstract
This paper proposes an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based approach to classify different contexts, with the goal of enhancing the management of residential energy resources. The increasing penetration of renewable based generation has completely changed the paradigm of the power and energy sector. The intermittent nature of these resources requires the system to incentivize the adaptability of consumers in order to guarantee the balance between generation and consumption. This leads to the emergence of several incentives with the objective of increasing the flexibility from the consumer's side. This, allied to the increasing price of electricity, leads to an increasing need for consumers to adapt their consumption in order to improve energy efficiency, decrease energy bills, and achieve a better use of their own generation resources. With this, several House Management Systems (HMS), and Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) have emerged. These systems allow adapting the consumption (or suggesting changes in consumers' habits) according to several factors. However, in order to make this management truly smart, there is a need for adaptation to different contexts, so that changes can be done accordingly to the different situations that are faced at each time. This paper addresses this problem by proposing a novel methodology that enables classifying different situations in different contexts, according to different contextual variables. © 2017 IEEE.

Abstract

Abstract
A key challenge in the power and energy field is the development of decision-support systems that enable studying big problems as a whole. The interoperability between systems that address specific parts of the global problem is essential. Ontologies ease the interoperability between heterogeneous systems providing semantic meaning to the information exchanged between the various parties. The use of ontologies within Smart Grids has been proposed based on the Common Information Model, which defines a common vocabulary describing the basic components used in electricity transportation and distribution. However, these ontologies are focused on utilities needs. The development of ontologies that allow the representation of diverse knowledge sources is essential, aiming at supporting the interaction between entities of different natures, facilitating the interoperability between these systems. This paper proposes a set of ontologies to enable the interoperability between different types of simulators, namely regarding electricity markets, the smart grid, and residential energy management. A case study based on real data shows the advantages of the proposed approach in enabling comprehensive power system simulation studies. © 2018 Power Systems Computation Conference.