Heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems are omnipresent in modern buildings and are responsible for a considerable share of consumed energy and the electricity bill in buildings. On the other hand, solar energy is abundant and could be used to support the building HVAC system through cogeneration of electricity and heat. Micro-scale concentrated solar power (MicroCSP) is a propitious solution for such applications that can be integrated into the building HVAC system to optimally provide both electricity and heat, on-demand via application of optimal control techniques. The use of thermal energy storage (TES) in MicroCSP adds dispatching capabilities to the MicroCSP energy production that will assist in optimal energy management in buildings. This work presents a review of the existing contributions on the combination of MicroCSP and HVAC systems in buildings and how it compares to other thermal-assisted HVAC applications. Different topologies and architectures for the integration of MicroCSP and building HVAC systems are proposed, and the components of standard MicroCSP systems with their control-oriented models are explained. Furthermore, this paper details the different control strategies to optimally manage the energy flow, both electrical and thermal, from the solar field to the building HVAC system to minimize energy consumption and/or operational cost.

This paper presents a proof-of-concept for a novel dq droop control technique that applies DC droop control methods to fixed frequency inverter-based AC microgrids using the dq0 transformation. Microgrids are usually composed of distributed generation units (DGUs) that are electronically coupled to each other through power converters. An inherent property of inverter-based microgrids is that, unlike microgrids with spinning machines, the frequency of the parallel-connected DGUs is a global variable independent from the output power since the inverters can control the output waveform frequency with a high level of precision. Therefore, conventional droop control methods that distort the system frequency are not suitable for microgrids operating at a fixed frequency. It is shown that the proposed distributed droop control allows accurate sharing of the active and reactive power without altering the microgrid frequency. The simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed droop control. Indeed, following a load change, the dq droop controller was able to share both active and reactive power between the DGUs, whereas maintaining the microgrid frequency deviation at 0% and the bus voltage deviations below 6% of their respective nominal values.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data are reshaping organizations and businesses. Human Resources (HR) management and talent development make no exception, as they tend to involve more automation and growing quantities of data. Because this brings implications on workforce, career transparency, and equal opportunities, overseeing what fuels AI and analytical models, their quality standards, integrity, and correctness becomes an imperative for those aspiring to such systems. Based on an ontology transformation to B-machines, this article presents an approach to constructing a valid and error-free career agent with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). In short, the agent's policy is built on a framework we called Multi State-Actor (MuStAc) using a decentralized training approach. Its purpose is to predict both relevant and valid career steps to employees, based on their profiles and company pathways (observations). Observations can comprise various data elements such as the current occupation, past experiences, performance, skills, qualifications, and so on. The policy takes in all these observations and outputs the next recommended career step, in an environment set as the combination of an HR ontology and an Event-B model, which generates action spaces with respect to formal properties. The Event-B model and formal properties are derived using OWL to B transformation.

Demand-side management (DSM) has become one of the most efficient tools to face challenges of renewable electricity integration, especially using dynamic pricing (DP) in order to translate generation variations into corresponding pricing signals and hence motivate the consumers to adapt their consumption accordingly. In this paper, a real-time pricing (RTP) of renewable electricity is proposed considering two utility functions, one related to the grid (U G ) and the other related to the user (Uu), to obtain, through a backward induction optimization, an actual load that follows, as much as possible, the power generation curve of the renewable energy sources (RES), thus allowing the grid to maintain its stability while sparing storage capacity. A numerical study case of a remote island in Zhoushan, China, shows that this strategy has a satisfying performance in achieving the research main goal with a reduction of up to 70% in storage need.