Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning for Building Heating Control and Demand-side Flexibility

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jüni, Colin, Montazeri, Mina, Guo, Yi, Bellizio, Federica, Sansavini, Giovanni, Heer, Philipp
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Jüni, Colin
Montazeri, Mina
Guo, Yi
Bellizio, Federica
Sansavini, Giovanni
Heer, Philipp
author_facet Jüni, Colin
Montazeri, Mina
Guo, Yi
Bellizio, Federica
Sansavini, Giovanni
Heer, Philipp
contents 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, is essential for grid stability and energy efficiency. This paper presents a safe deep reinforcement learning-based control framework to optimize building space heating while enabling demand-side flexibility provision for power system operators. A deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm is used as the core deep reinforcement learning method, enabling the controller to learn an optimal heating strategy through interaction with the building thermal model while maintaining occupant comfort, minimizing energy cost, and providing flexibility. To address safety concerns with reinforcement learning, particularly regarding compliance with flexibility requests, we propose a real-time adaptive safety-filter to ensure that the system operates within predefined constraints during demand-side flexibility provision. The proposed real-time adaptive safety filter guarantees full compliance with flexibility requests from system operators and improves energy and cost efficiency -- achieving up to 50% savings compared to a rule-based controller -- while outperforming a standalone deep reinforcement learning-based controller in energy and cost metrics, with only a slight increase in comfort temperature violations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_16033
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning for Building Heating Control and Demand-side Flexibility
Jüni, Colin
Montazeri, Mina
Guo, Yi
Bellizio, Federica
Sansavini, Giovanni
Heer, Philipp
Systems and Control
Artificial Intelligence
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, is essential for grid stability and energy efficiency. This paper presents a safe deep reinforcement learning-based control framework to optimize building space heating while enabling demand-side flexibility provision for power system operators. A deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm is used as the core deep reinforcement learning method, enabling the controller to learn an optimal heating strategy through interaction with the building thermal model while maintaining occupant comfort, minimizing energy cost, and providing flexibility. To address safety concerns with reinforcement learning, particularly regarding compliance with flexibility requests, we propose a real-time adaptive safety-filter to ensure that the system operates within predefined constraints during demand-side flexibility provision. The proposed real-time adaptive safety filter guarantees full compliance with flexibility requests from system operators and improves energy and cost efficiency -- achieving up to 50% savings compared to a rule-based controller -- while outperforming a standalone deep reinforcement learning-based controller in energy and cost metrics, with only a slight increase in comfort temperature violations.
title Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning for Building Heating Control and Demand-side Flexibility
topic Systems and Control
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16033