Enhancing Decision Support Systems for the Energy Sector with Sustainable Artificial Intelligence Solutions

Artificial intelligence (AI) can significantly enhance the decision-making processes in a plethora of key energy-related challenges such as energy supply and demand prediction, grid flexibility, asset maintenance and operation, and load forecasting. As such, it is expected to play a crucial role in the digitalisation and sustainability of the energy industry. Despite the potential benefits of AI and the wealth of research in the related fields, several factors, including a lack of in-house AI expertise, data interoperability issues, unclear regulations, and ethical concerns, prevent stakeholders from the Electric Power and Energy Systems (EPES) sector from taking a universal approach to the EPES value chain and fully utilizing AI's potential. This paper presents our work that aims to address the former challenges by proposing a holistic approach to utilizing, developing, and deploying state-of-the-art AI and data analytic services for the decision makers of the energy sector. The framework will be seamlessly integrated with the AI-on-Demand platform, i.e. Europe’s one-stop-shop for AI assets. The paper introduces the I-NERGY framework and describes its bidirectional relation to the AIoD platform under the light of contributing to the EPES value chain optimal management, particularly for SMEs and non-tech industries.