PhD Researcher in Smart Energy Transition Decision-Making

This PhD position at Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) focuses on simulating how decisions about smart energy transitions impact and are influenced by building owners and end-users. The project aims to create a Knowledge Base and digital representations to assess the interplay between social and technical systems, ensuring equity and justice in energy transitions. The successful candidate will work within the LAB research group, Architecture & Climat, to map current governance schemes, extract patterns of ownership and control, and implement these using ontologies and semantic web technologies. The role includes participation in research seminars, upskilling workshops, and doctoral training.

• Conduct a state-of-the-art review of how smart energy transition decisions are defined and represented in policies, governance schemes, technical standards, and business models.
• Extract and abstract recurrent patterns of ownership, governance, and interdependencies to build a Knowledge Base for decision-making frameworks.
• Develop pseudocode representations in the Knowledge Base using the OntoAgency vocabulary and implement them in Protégé using OWL/RDF.
• Digitally represent real-world decisions and outcomes based on case studies to validate the Knowledge Base and digital frameworks.
• Collaborate closely with the Architecture & Climat research group on research seminars and upskilling workshops.
• Participate in doctoral training focused on thesis development and scientific dissemination.