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A Learning Agent for Heat-Pump Thermostat Control.
Daniel Urieli
and Peter Stone.
In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference
on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), May 2013.
[PDF]426.6kB [slides.pdf]4.6MB
Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems are one of the biggest energy consumers around the world. With the efforts of moving to sustainable energy consumption, heat-pump based HVAC systems have gained popularity due to their high efficiency and due to the fact that they are powered by electricity rather than by gas or oil. One drawback of heat-pump systems is that their efficiency sharply decreases when the outdoor temperature is around or below freezing. Therefore, they are backed up by an auxiliary heating system that is effective in cold weather, but that consumes twice as much energy. A popular way of saving energy in HVAC systems is setting back the thermostat, meaning, relaxing the heating/cooling requirements when occupants are not at home. While this practice leads to significant energy savings in many systems, it could in fact increase the energy consumption in a heat-pump based system, using existing control strategies, as it forces an excessive usage of the auxiliary heater. In this paper, we design and implement a complete, adaptive reinforcement learning agent which applies a new control strategy for a heat-pump thermostat. For our experiments, we use a complex, realistic simulator that was developed for the US Department of Energy. Results show that the learned control strategy (1) leads to roughly 7.0\%-14.5\% energy savings in typical homes in the New York City, Boston, and Chicago areas; while (2) keeping the occupants' comfort level unchanged when compared to an existing strategy that is deployed in practice.
@InProceedings{AAMAS13-urieli,
author = {Daniel Urieli and Peter Stone},
title = {A Learning Agent for Heat-Pump Thermostat Control},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS)},
location = {Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA},
month = {May},
year = {2013},
abstract = "
Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems
are one of the biggest energy consumers around the
world. With the efforts of moving to sustainable energy
consumption, heat-pump based HVAC systems have gained
popularity due to their high efficiency and due to the
fact that they are powered by electricity rather than by
gas or oil. One drawback of heat-pump systems is that
their efficiency sharply decreases when the outdoor
temperature is around or below freezing. Therefore, they
are backed up by an auxiliary heating system that is
effective in cold weather, but that consumes twice as
much energy. A popular way of saving energy in HVAC
systems is \emph{setting back} the thermostat, meaning,
relaxing the heating/cooling requirements when occupants
are not at home. While this practice leads to
significant energy savings in many systems, it could in
fact increase the energy consumption in a heat-pump
based system, using existing control strategies, as it
forces an excessive usage of the auxiliary heater. In
this paper, we design and implement a complete, adaptive
reinforcement learning agent which applies a new control
strategy for a heat-pump thermostat. For our
experiments, we use a complex, realistic simulator that
was developed for the US Department of Energy. Results
show that the learned control strategy (1) leads to
roughly \textbf{7.0\%-14.5\%} energy savings in typical
homes in the New York City, Boston, and Chicago areas;
while (2) keeping the occupants' comfort level unchanged
when compared to an existing strategy that is deployed
in practice.
",
}
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