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This work presents a fully data-driven, black-box pipeline to obtain an optimal control policy for a multi-loop building control problem based on historical building and weather data, thus without the need for complex physics-based…

The decentralisation and unpredictability of new renewable energy sources require rethinking our energy system. Data-driven approaches, such as reinforcement learning (RL), have emerged as new control strategies for operating these systems,…

Within a robotic context, we merge the techniques of passivity-based control (PBC) and reinforcement learning (RL) with the goal of eliminating some of their reciprocal weaknesses, as well as inducing novel promising features in the…

To reduce global carbon emissions and limit climate change, controlling energy consumption in buildings is an important piece of the puzzle. Here, we specifically focus on using a demand response (DR) algorithm to limit the energy…

The building energy community lacks a foundational thermal model, i.e., a single pretrained model capable of generalizing across diverse buildings, climates, and control strategies without building-specific calibration. Achieving this…

It is estimated that about 40%-50% of total electricity consumption in commercial buildings can be attributed to Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems. Minimizing the energy cost while considering the thermal comfort of…

As renewable energy sources become more prevalent, accurately modeling power grid dynamics is becoming increasingly more complex. Concurrently, data acquisition and realtime system state monitoring are becoming more available for control…

The development of current building energy system operation has benefited from: 1. Informational support from the optimal design through simulation or first-principles models; 2. System load and energy prediction through machine learning…

Recent years have seen significant advancements in designing reinforcement learning (RL)-based agents for building energy management. While individual success is observed in simulated or controlled environments, the scalability of RL…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising optimal control technique for multi-energy management systems. It does not require a model a priori - reducing the upfront and ongoing project-specific engineering effort and is capable of learning…

Global buildings account for about 30% of the total energy consumption and carbon emission, raising severe energy and environmental concerns. Therefore, it is significant and urgent to develop novel smart building energy management (SBEM)…

Building operations consume approximately 40% of global energy, with Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems responsible for up to 50% of this consumption. As HVAC energy demands are expected to rise, optimising system…

Buildings account for approximately 40% of global energy consumption, and with the growing share of intermittent renewable energy sources, enabling demand-side flexibility, particularly in heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems,…

The demand of finite raw materials will keep increasing as they fuel modern society. Simultaneously, solutions for stopping carbon emissions in the short term are not available, thus making the net zero target extremely challenging to…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…

Traditional control theory-based methods require tailored engineering for each system and constant fine-tuning. In power plant control, one often needs to obtain a precise representation of the system dynamics and carefully design the…

Standard (black-box) regression models may not necessarily suffice for accurate identification and prediction of thermal dynamics in buildings. This is particularly apparent when either the flow rate or the inlet temperature of the thermal…

In recent years, significant progress has been made in the field of robotic reinforcement learning (RL), enabling methods that handle complex image observations, train in the real world, and incorporate auxiliary data, such as…

Modern reinforcement learning (RL) systems capture deep truths about general, human problem-solving. In domains where new data can be simulated cheaply, these systems uncover sequential decision-making policies that far exceed the ability…

This paper proposes a learning-based model predictive control (MPC) approach for the thermal control of a four-zone smart building. The objectives are to minimize energy consumption and maintain the residents' comfort. The proposed control…