Explainable Reinforcement Learning-based Home Energy Management Systems using Differentiable Decision Trees

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Gokhale, Gargya, Claessens, Bert, Develder, Chris
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Gokhale, Gargya
Claessens, Bert
Develder, Chris
author_facet Gokhale, Gargya
Claessens, Bert
Develder, Chris
contents With the ongoing energy transition, demand-side flexibility has become an important aspect of the modern power grid for providing grid support and allowing further integration of sustainable energy sources. Besides traditional sources, the residential sector is another major and largely untapped source of flexibility, driven by the increased adoption of solar PV, home batteries, and EVs. However, unlocking this residential flexibility is challenging as it requires a control framework that can effectively manage household energy consumption, and maintain user comfort while being readily scalable across different, diverse houses. We aim to address this challenging problem and introduce a reinforcement learning-based approach using differentiable decision trees. This approach integrates the scalability of data-driven reinforcement learning with the explainability of (differentiable) decision trees. This leads to a controller that can be easily adapted across different houses and provides a simple control policy that can be explained to end-users, further improving user acceptance. As a proof-of-concept, we analyze our method using a home energy management problem, comparing its performance with commercially available rule-based baseline and standard neural network-based RL controllers. Through this preliminary study, we show that the performance of our proposed method is comparable to standard RL-based controllers, outperforming baseline controllers by ~20% in terms of daily cost savings while being straightforward to explain.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_11947
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Explainable Reinforcement Learning-based Home Energy Management Systems using Differentiable Decision Trees
Gokhale, Gargya
Claessens, Bert
Develder, Chris
Systems and Control
Machine Learning
With the ongoing energy transition, demand-side flexibility has become an important aspect of the modern power grid for providing grid support and allowing further integration of sustainable energy sources. Besides traditional sources, the residential sector is another major and largely untapped source of flexibility, driven by the increased adoption of solar PV, home batteries, and EVs. However, unlocking this residential flexibility is challenging as it requires a control framework that can effectively manage household energy consumption, and maintain user comfort while being readily scalable across different, diverse houses. We aim to address this challenging problem and introduce a reinforcement learning-based approach using differentiable decision trees. This approach integrates the scalability of data-driven reinforcement learning with the explainability of (differentiable) decision trees. This leads to a controller that can be easily adapted across different houses and provides a simple control policy that can be explained to end-users, further improving user acceptance. As a proof-of-concept, we analyze our method using a home energy management problem, comparing its performance with commercially available rule-based baseline and standard neural network-based RL controllers. Through this preliminary study, we show that the performance of our proposed method is comparable to standard RL-based controllers, outperforming baseline controllers by ~20% in terms of daily cost savings while being straightforward to explain.
title Explainable Reinforcement Learning-based Home Energy Management Systems using Differentiable Decision Trees
topic Systems and Control
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.11947