Reinforcement Learning to Reduce Building Energy Consumption

The need for Energy Savings has become increasily foundamental to fight Climate Change. We have been working on a cloud-based RL algorithm that can retrofit existing HVAC controls to obtain substantial results. In the last decade, a new class of controls which relies on Artificial Intelligence have been proposed. In particular, we are going to highlight data-driven controls based on Reinforcement Learning (RL), since they showed from the very beginning promising results as HVAC controls [2]. There are two main ways to upgrade with RL the air conditioning systems: to implement RL on new systems or to retrofit the existing ones.