Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics and Systems Engineering
Organisation / Company: University of Genoa
Is the Hosting related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No
The University of Genoa (UNIGE), located in Genoa, ITALY, welcomes postdoctoral researchers of any nationality, with an excellent track record, to apply for the European Commission Marie Sklodowska-Curie (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025. Our University has been a beneficiary of several MSCA-PF in Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe.
The MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship is a funding scheme of the European Commission’s Horizon Europe Research & Innovation programme, dedicated to excellent research promoting international mobility, as well as interdisciplinary and intersectoral exchanges.
The MSCA fellowship grant provides a competitive salary plus mobility and family allowances if applicable, as well as a contribution to cover research, training, and networking costs. The research projects will have 2- or 3-year durations.
Selected candidates will be provided with special support for proposal writing and development.
The University of Genoa will organize in May the fifth edition of the Masterclass MSCA@UniGe. Selected candidate researchers will have the opportunity to attend a 2-day online intensive training and coaching course on how to write a successful proposal. This masterclass is a pathway of support to candidates and their supervisors in preparing project proposals, including prescreening activity of the draft proposals and the organization of dedicated B2B meetings, by the European Research Office of UniGe, National Contact Point, and other experts.
The masterclass will take place on May/June 2025.
MSCA domain: Information Science and Engineering (ENG)
The research group is within the DIBRIS (Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics and Systems Engineering) Department and it is devoted to optimization and control techniques for energy and sustainable systems in general. The research group is composed of about 10 people, and there are two different laboratories: one in Savona Campus (more related to Energy Engineering) and the other one in Genova (more related to transportation and logistics).
The research activity has the general objective of the development and application of approaches based on the typical methodologies of Systems Engineering, in the context of application issues of significant interdisciplinary interest, generically referable to sustainable energy, logistics, and environmental systems.
From an application point of view, in the last 15 years, the activity has been focused on the topic of "Energy" and mainly on electricity grids (smart grids), sustainable buildings (smart buildings), and the recharging of electric vehicles, also in connection with the energy research infrastructures at the Savona Campus (Smart Polygeneration Microgrid, Smart Energy Building, Smart City living lab) to develop new algorithms and methods and apply them in the field as demonstrative actions. Such infrastructures have always provided the possibility to participate in national and international projects and to develop research contracts with companies.
These topics allow the development and application of methods (model predictive control, distributed optimization, identification) typical of automation, taking into consideration particularly important aspects such as telecommunications (for the acquisition of data in the field and implementation of commands to local controllers), ICT platforms (to process large amounts of data), and control techniques based on learning.
Since electric vehicles are an integral part of the smart grid, and thanks to the collaboration with the Duferco and Iveco companies, the research group has worked and is working on the management of electric vehicle charging. This has also connections with transportation systems and logistics (that we are developing together with the Decathlon company).
The methods and models developed in the context of microgrids and buildings are completely general and have therefore more recently allowed the application to generic electrical networks, for which it was necessary and important to use methods related to distributed optimization. Thanks to a collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Prof. Anuradha Annaswamy), we have applied and developed methods to manage generic networks in a distributed way.
These methods have also been applied to logistics and transportation networks. In summary, the main activities of the group are:
1. Planning and sustainable management of smart energy grids and multi-vector energy systems
2. Exploitation of renewable sources for energy generation
3. Electric mobility: methods and models for the management of electric vehicles and charging stations
4. Planning of systems for the disposal and collection of solid waste in urban areas
5. Models and methods for the management of water resources
6. Control of logistic and transport flows
7. Development of algorithms for distributed optimization
The research activity has been and is developed together with companies such as: ENEL, Duferco, Decathlon, Iveco, Stam, etc.
Research Project Description
This activity focuses on new models, methods, and technologies for energy efficiency and sustainability in transportation and energy systems. The focus is thus on articles considering sustainable transportation, such as electric vehicles (EVs) and hydrogen-based vehicles, integrated with the smart grid requirements.
The need for attaining a significant reduction in the emissions of greenhouse gases (and, in general, pollutants) has led to the necessity of introducing cleaner and more efficient technologies for energy needs in different sectors, such as transportation, smart grids, and sustainable buildings. This trend has created new challenges for the development of models, methods, and ICT-based technologies. For example, sustainable transportation has posed attention to new possible combustibles that in turn require a redesign of the overall supply chain and a new planning framework based on the integration with energy systems and smart grids. On the other side, smart grids include renewables, microgrids, CSs, and distributed generation that require careful management of the grid and the development of demand response programs. In a not-so-futuristic vision, EVs, i.e., private cars, buses, trucks, ships, and so on, will be widely used and new technologies will be proposed for CSs, batteries, and vehicles. Moreover, EVs will act as distributed energy resources, since they can provide regulation services and power supply, thus enabling vehicle-to-grid (V2G) or vehicle-to-building (V2B) operations.
To respond to these emerging changes and needs, researchers are intensively investigating the application of automation and optimization tools and techniques to sustainable transportation and energy systems, with particular attention to the use of optimization models for location of CSs, charging operations, business models, and EVs integration in smart grids, microgrids, biomass supply chain design for biodiesel production, hydrogen production management, electrification of harbors, and electric public buses management.
In particular, the activity will be related to the following major research topics in the wide area of automation and optimization for sustainable transportation and energy systems:
1. Optimal planning of CSs in smart cities through interdisciplinary approaches.
2. Sustainable transportation and mobility.
3. EVs integration in smart grids, including V2G and V2B technologies.
4. Reliability of transportation and energy systems.
5. Demand response in the energy market.
6. Power management in CSs and smart parking.
7. Optimal scheduling of EVs fleets and car sharing.
8. Optimal routing and charging of green vehicles.
9. Joint design of electrical and transportation networks.
10. Optimal routing and charging in warehouses and manufacturing systems considering robots and other autonomous vehicles.
From a methodological point of view, the focus is on distributed optimization, operation research, and model predictive control.
For MSCA-PF 25 call (opening foreseen on 9th April 2025), at the deadline for the submission of proposals (10th September 2025), postdoctoral candidates shall have a maximum of 8 years of postdoctoral research experience and must not have resided or carried out their main activities in Italy (for European Fellowship) or in the Third Country of the outgoing phase (for Global Fellowship) for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to the abovementioned deadline.
More info on MSCA PF are available at the following link:
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