A review of reinforcement learning methodologies on control systems for building energy
Year: 2018
Type: report
Abstract: The usage of energy directly leads to a great amount of consumption of the non-renewable fossil resources. Exploiting fossil resources energy can influence both climate and health via ineluctable emissions. Raising awareness, choosing alternative energy and developing energy efficient equipment contributes to reducing the demand for fossil resources energy, but the implementation of them usually takes a long time. Since building energy amounts to around one-third of global energy consumption, and systems in buildings, e.g. HVAC, can be intervened by individual building management, advanced and reliable control techniques for buildings are expected to have a substantial contribution to reducing global energy consumptions. Among those control techniques, the model-free, data-driven reinforcement learning method seems distinctive and applicable. The success of the reinforcement learning method in many artificial intelligence applications has brought us an explicit indication of implementing the method on building energy control. Fruitful algorithms complement each other and guarantee the quality of the optimisation. As a central brain of smart building automation systems, the control technique directly affects the performance of buildings. However, the examination of previous works based on reinforcement learning methodologies are not available and, moreover, how the algorithms can be developed is still vague. Therefore, this paper briefly analyses the empirical applications from the methodology point of view and proposes the future research direction.
Language: English
Subfield: Building and Construction
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2809705500