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Main Authors: Gao, Guanyu, Li, Jie, Wen, Yonggang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2019
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.04693
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author Gao, Guanyu
Li, Jie
Wen, Yonggang
author_facet Gao, Guanyu
Li, Jie
Wen, Yonggang
contents Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) is extremely energy-consuming, accounting for 40% of total building energy consumption. Therefore, it is crucial to design some energy-efficient building thermal control policies which can reduce the energy consumption of HVAC while maintaining the comfort of the occupants. However, implementing such a policy is challenging, because it involves various influencing factors in a building environment, which are usually hard to model and may be different from case to case. To address this challenge, we propose a deep reinforcement learning based framework for energy optimization and thermal comfort control in smart buildings. We formulate the building thermal control as a cost-minimization problem which jointly considers the energy consumption of HVAC and the thermal comfort of the occupants. To solve the problem, we first adopt a deep neural network based approach for predicting the occupants' thermal comfort, and then adopt Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (DDPG) for learning the thermal control policy. To evaluate the performance, we implement a building thermal control simulation system and evaluate the performance under various settings. The experiment results show that our method can improve the thermal comfort prediction accuracy, and reduce the energy consumption of HVAC while improving the occupants' thermal comfort.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1901_04693
institution arXiv
publishDate 2019
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Energy-Efficient Thermal Comfort Control in Smart Buildings via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Gao, Guanyu
Li, Jie
Wen, Yonggang
Systems and Control
Artificial Intelligence
Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) is extremely energy-consuming, accounting for 40% of total building energy consumption. Therefore, it is crucial to design some energy-efficient building thermal control policies which can reduce the energy consumption of HVAC while maintaining the comfort of the occupants. However, implementing such a policy is challenging, because it involves various influencing factors in a building environment, which are usually hard to model and may be different from case to case. To address this challenge, we propose a deep reinforcement learning based framework for energy optimization and thermal comfort control in smart buildings. We formulate the building thermal control as a cost-minimization problem which jointly considers the energy consumption of HVAC and the thermal comfort of the occupants. To solve the problem, we first adopt a deep neural network based approach for predicting the occupants' thermal comfort, and then adopt Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (DDPG) for learning the thermal control policy. To evaluate the performance, we implement a building thermal control simulation system and evaluate the performance under various settings. The experiment results show that our method can improve the thermal comfort prediction accuracy, and reduce the energy consumption of HVAC while improving the occupants' thermal comfort.
title Energy-Efficient Thermal Comfort Control in Smart Buildings via Deep Reinforcement Learning
topic Systems and Control
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.04693