Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa

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Publications

Engineering students education in sustainability: The moderating role of emotional intelligence

Publication . Nogueira, Teresa; Castro, Rui; Magano, José

In the context of a lack of quantitative research approaching an engineering education in sustainability, this cross-sectional study aims to investigate whether efforts to promote sustainability education contribute to shaping the beliefs, attitudes, and intentions towards sustainability in a sample of Portuguese engineering schools students; in addition, this study investigates whether emotional intelligence impacts the students’ motivation to learn more about sustainability and whether it plays a role in moderating the relationships between those variables. A survey was carried out on a sample of 184 students from two major Portuguese engineering schools. A model was found showing that beliefs, attitudes, and gender are predictors of students’ intentions towards sustainability, explaining 62.6% of its variance. Furthermore, the findings reveal that women have stronger beliefs and intentions towards sustainability than men and that students with higher emotional intelligence are more motivated to learn more about sustainability. In addition, emotional intelligence has a negative and significant moderating impact on the relationship between attitudes and students’ intentions towards sustainability, being stronger for lower levels of emotional intelligence and having a similar, yet non-significant, effect on the relationship between beliefs and students’ intentions towards sustainability. The results suggest that emotional intelligence should be considered a competence and a tool in engineering education in order to enhance students’ inclination towards sustainable development.

2023Journal article

Open access

Near real-time management of appliances, distributed generation and electric vehicles for demand response participation

Publication . Fernandes, Filipe; Morais, Hugo; Vale, Zita

Consumer-centric energy management approaches are emerging as a major solution for future power systems. In this context, intelligent home management systems should control different kinds of devices existing in the houses assuring convenient comfort levels and understanding the users’ behaviour. At the same time, the home management systems should be able to interact with other actors such as energy communities, aggregators, and system operators. The main contribution of this work is a new methodology allowing intelligent management, in near real-time (1 minute), of different types of energy resources existing in a smart home. The energy resources include appliances and other loads, micro-generation, and electric vehicles. The proposed system includes a permanent evaluation of the operation state of each energy resource considering their functional model and the behaviour and comfort level defined by the users. Participation in demand response programs reducing the power consumption limits is also considered showing the advantage of the proposed approach. The case study contains two scenarios considering a demand response program of power limitation with 120 minutes duration. To guarantee the participation in these demand response events, the system should evaluate the priority of each device according to its model. A domestic consumer with 45 energy resources (appliances, generation, and electric vehicles) is used for demonstration purposes.

2022Journal article

Open access