Prof. Dr. Pierluigi Siano
Department of Management and Innovation Systems, University of Salerno, Italy

Pierluigi Siano received his MSc degree in electronic engineering and his Ph.D. degree in information and electrical engineering from the University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy, in 2001 and 2006, respectively.

He is a Professor and Scientific Director of the Smart Grids and Smart Cities Laboratory with the Department of Management and Innovation Systems, University of Salerno.

His research activities are centered on demand response, energy management, the integration of distributed energy resources in smart grids, electricity markets, and the planning and management of power systems.

Dr. Barry Hayes
School of Engineering, University College Cork, Ireland

Dr. Barry Hayes is an Assistant Professor in Electrical Power Engineering at University College Cork (UCC) and a Funded Investigator at the MaREI Research Centre (www.marei.ie). Prior to joining UCC, he was an Assistant Professor at the National University of Ireland Galway (2016–2018), and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie research fellow at IMDEA Energy in Madrid (2013–2016). He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Power Systems Engineering from the University of Edinburgh (2013) and has held visiting researcher positions at National Grid UK (2011) and the University of Tennessee (2016). Barry is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and has co-authored more than 40 peer-reviewed, international publications in books, conference proceedings, and journals. Barry’s research group focuses on the electricity grid integration of sustainable energy technologies, and the operation and planning of future power systems. Barry is the UCC principal investigator on a €3.8 million research project on local energy trading called “CENTS” (Co-operative Energy Trading System).

Prof. Dr. Zita Vale
GECAD-Research Group on Intelligent Engineering and Computing for Advanced Innovation and Development, Polytechnic of Porto (P.PORTO), Portugal

Zita Vale is a Full Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Institute of Engineering—Polytechnic of Porto (ISEP). She received her diploma in Electrical Engineering in 1986, her Ph.D. in 1993, and her Habilitation in 2003, from the University of Porto.

She works in the area of Power and Energy Systems, with a special interest in the application of artificial intelligence techniques.

She has been involved in more than 60 funded projects related to the development and the use of knowledge-based systems, multi-agent systems, neural networks, particle swarm intelligence, and data mining. The main application fields of these projects comprise:

- Smart grids, accommodating an intensive use of renewable energy sources, distributed energy resources (DER), namely distributed generation (DG), storage, electrical vehicles, including the ones with gradable capability (V2G), and demand flexibility. The real-time management and simulation of energy resources, considering electrical networks, buildings, and diverse Internet of Things (IoT) and machine-to-machine (M2M) approaches are relevant aspects of her work in this field;

- Electricity markets, addressing decision support for market participants, prices and tariffs, ancillary services, energy transactions, service provision, and market simulation in the scope of wholesale and local markets. The integration of DER, demand response, and EVs in electricity markets, transactive energy (TE), and peer-to-peer approaches are important aspects of her work. Her work also focuses on the conception, development, and test of new business models for market participants and aggregation models for energy resources and the respective management and operation methods.

The results of her research are published in more than 140 journal papers.

Professor Zita Vale actively participates in several technical working groups and committees, namely from IEEE. She also has regular activity as a reviewer and an evaluator for papers and project proposals and monitoring, from different funding agencies around the world.