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Volume 10 Issue 8
Aug.  2023

IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica

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Article Navigation >  IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica  > 2023  >  10(8): 1704-1715
S. A. A. Rizvi, A. J. Pertzborn, and  Z. Lin,  “Development of a bias compensating Q-learning controller for a multi-zone HVAC facility,” IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, vol. 10, no. 8, pp. 1704–1715, Aug. 2023. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2023.123624
Citation: S. A. A. Rizvi, A. J. Pertzborn, and  Z. Lin,  “Development of a bias compensating Q-learning controller for a multi-zone HVAC facility,” IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, vol. 10, no. 8, pp. 1704–1715, Aug. 2023. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2023.123624
shu

Development of a Bias Compensating Q-Learning Controller for a Multi-Zone HVAC Facility

doi: 10.1109/JAS.2023.123624
Funds:  This work was supported in part by NIST (70NANB18H161)
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    Abstract

  • We present the development of a bias compensating reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that optimizes thermal comfort (by minimizing tracking error) and control utilization (by penalizing setpoint deviations) in a multi-zone heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) lab facility subject to unmeasurable disturbances and unknown dynamics. It is shown that the presence of unmeasurable disturbance results in an inconsistent learning equation in traditional RL controllers leading to parameter estimation bias (even with integral action support), and in the extreme case, the divergence of the learning algorithm. We demonstrate this issue by applying the popular Q-learning algorithm to linear quadratic regulation (LQR) of a multi-zone HVAC environment and showing that, even with integral support, the algorithm exhibits bias issue during the learning phase when the HVAC disturbance is unmeasurable due to unknown heat gains, occupancy variations, light sources, and outside weather changes. To address this difficulty, we present a bias compensating learning equation that learns a lumped bias term as a result of disturbances (and possibly other sources) in conjunction with the optimal control parameters. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme not only recovers the bias-free optimal control parameters but it does so without explicitly learning the dynamic model or estimating the disturbances, demonstrating the effectiveness of the algorithm in addressing the above challenges.

     

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    Highlights

    • A bias compensating Q-learning algorithm to handle unmeasurable disturbances
    • Implementation aspects of Q-learning in a multi-zone HVAC facility
    • Robustness to disturbances arising from unknown heat gains and weather variations
    • Analysis of various exploration signals for reinforcement learning based HVAC control
    • Asymptotic temperature tracking and parameter convergence

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