Generalising Battery Control in Net-Zero Buildings via Personalised Federated RL
This work addresses energy cost and emission reduction in smart grids, but it is incremental as it applies existing RL algorithms in a federated setup.
The paper tackled optimal energy management in building microgrids using a privacy-preserving federated reinforcement learning framework, showing that Federated TRPO is comparable to state-of-the-art methods without hyperparameter tuning.
This work studies the challenge of optimal energy management in building-based microgrids through a collaborative and privacy-preserving framework. We evaluated two common RL algorithms (PPO and TRPO) in different collaborative setups to manage distributed energy resources (DERs) efficiently. Using a customized version of the CityLearn environment and synthetically generated data, we simulate and design net-zero energy scenarios for microgrids composed of multiple buildings. Our approach emphasizes reducing energy costs and carbon emissions while ensuring privacy. Experimental results demonstrate that Federated TRPO is comparable with state-of-the-art federated RL methodologies without hyperparameter tuning. The proposed framework highlights the feasibility of collaborative learning for achieving optimal control policies in energy systems, advancing the goals of sustainable and efficient smart grids. Our code is accessible \href{https://github.com/Optimization-and-Machine-Learning-Lab/energy_fed_trpo.git}{\textit{this repo}}.