Constrained Reinforcement Learning for Safe Heat Pump Control
arXiv:2409.19716
The paper introduces a building simulator (I4B) and a constrained Soft Actor-Critic algorithm with a linear smoothed log barrier (CSAC-LB) to safely optimize heat pump operation, balancing energy efficiency and thermal comfort.
Abstract
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 systems in the buildings, optimizing the energy efficiency while maintaining the residents' thermal comfort can be intuitively formulated as a constrained optimization problem. However, to solve it with RL may require large amount of data. Therefore, an accurate and versatile simulator is favored. In this paper, we propose a novel building simulator I4B which provides interfaces for different usages and apply a model-free constrained RL algorithm named constrained Soft Actor-Critic with Linear Smoothed Log Barrier function (CSAC-LB) to the heating optimization problem. Benchmarking against baseline algorithms demonstrates CSAC-LB's efficiency in data exploration, constraint satisfaction and performance.
accepted by European Control Conference 2026