One of the members of our research group received the title of a doctor just a few days ago. Alfonso González Briones defended his doctoral thesis on the 1st of June.
The title of his doctoral thesis is “A Multi-agent architecture for optimizing energy consumption using comfort agreements” and I myself have had the pleasure to supervise it. He proposes an architecture whose objective is to optimize energy consumption, independently of the characteristics of the building in which it is deployed. The use of energy is optimized by means of a common agreement which is achieved through negotiations between all the inhabitants while at the same time obtaining the desired energy optimisation.
On the basis of the presented architecture, a platform has been built to capture data from the environment, obtaining information from external sources and the inhabitants. The platform continuously analyses the collected data so that these data become useful information for the system and makes decisions to reduce energy consumption. In addition, the architecture integrates social computing techniques that make it possible to maintain user preferences in terms of temperature and lighting; the goal is twofold: to optimize energy consumption and to maintain the preferences that have been established in the negotiation.
I would like to congratulate him for receiving the title of a doctor and wish him a successful academic career. Congratulations Alfonso.