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Buildings with Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems play a crucial role in ensuring indoor comfort and efficiency. While traditionally governed by physics-based models, the emergence of big data has enabled data-driven…
Reinforcement learning (RL) techniques have been increasingly investigated for dynamic HVAC control in buildings. However, most studies focus on exploring solutions in online or off-policy scenarios without discussing in detail the…
Energy efficiency has become an integral aspect of modern computing infrastructure design, impacting the performance, cost, scalability, and durability of production systems. The incorporation of power actuation and sensing capabilities in…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a versatile framework for optimizing long-term goals. Although many real-world problems can be formalized with RL, learning and deploying a performant RL policy requires a system designed to address several…
In many practical control applications, the performance level of a closed-loop system degrades over time due to the change of plant characteristics. Thus, there is a strong need for redesigning a controller without going through the system…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a method for learning decision-making tasks that could enable robots to learn and adapt to their situation on-line. For an RL algorithm to be practical for robotic control tasks, it must learn in very few…
In this paper, we take a holistic approach to deal with the tradeoffs between energy use and comfort in commercial buildings. We developed a system called OCTOPUS, which employs a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework that uses…
The design of building heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system is critically important, as it accounts for around half of building energy consumption and directly affects occupant comfort, productivity, and health.…
This paper is a technical overview of DeepMind and Google's recent work on reinforcement learning for controlling commercial cooling systems. Building on expertise that began with cooling Google's data centers more efficiently, we recently…
A novel method, the Pareto Envelope Augmented with Reinforcement Learning (PEARL), has been developed to address the challenges posed by multi-objective problems, particularly in the field of engineering where the evaluation of candidate…
Process control is widely discussed in the manufacturing process, especially for semiconductor manufacturing. Due to unavoidable disturbances in manufacturing, different process controllers are proposed to realize variation reduction. Since…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful tool for optimal control that has found great success in Atari games, the game of Go, robotic control, and building optimization. RL is also very brittle; agents often overfit to their training…
The decarbonization of buildings presents new challenges for the reliability of the electrical grid as a result of the intermittency of renewable energy sources and increase in grid load brought about by end-use electrification. To restore…
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…
Smart buildings have great potential for shaping an energy-efficient, sustainable, and more economic future for our planet as buildings account for approximately 40% of the global energy consumption. Future of the smart buildings lies in…
Rapid urbanization, increasing integration of distributed renewable energy resources, energy storage, and electric vehicles introduce new challenges for the power grid. In the US, buildings represent about 70% of the total electricity…
Constrained Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a significant research area within RL, where integrating constraints with rewards is crucial for enhancing safety and performance across diverse control tasks. In the context of heating…
The inherent complexity of living cells as production units creates major challenges for maintaining stable and optimal bioprocess conditions, especially in open Photobioreactors (PBRs) exposed to fluctuating environments. To address this,…
Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is inherently a reactive method, operating under the assumption that it starts with no prior knowledge of the system and entirely depends on trial-and-error for learning. This approach faces several…
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…