Towards Off-policy Evaluation as a Prerequisite for Real-world Reinforcement Learning in Building Control

Publication Type

Conference Paper

Date Published

11/2020

Authors

DOI

Abstract

We present an initial study of off-policy evaluation (OPE), a prob-lem prerequisite to real-world reinforcement learning (RL), in the context of building control. OPE is the problem of estimating a pol-icy’s performance without running it on the actual system, using historical data from the existing controller. It enables the control en-gineers to ensure a new, pretrained policy satisfies the performance requirements and safety constraints of a real-world system, prior to interacting with it. While many methods have been developed for OPE, no study has evaluated which ones are suitable for building operational data, which are generated by deterministic policies and have limited coverage of the state-action space. After reviewing existing works and their assumptions, we adopted the approxi-mate model (AM) method. Furthermore, we used bootstrapping to quantify uncertainty and correct for bias. In a simulation study, we evaluated the proposed approach on 10 policies pretrained with im-itation learning. On average, the AM method estimated the energy and comfort costs with 1.84% and 14.1% error, respectively.

Journal

BuildSys '20: The 7th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and TransportationProceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Reinforcement Learning for Energy Management in Buildings & Cities

Year of Publication

2020

URL

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