PIRS: Physics-Informed Reward Shaping for SAC-Based Building Energy Management
Occupant comfort and grid-aware energy efficiency are competing objectives whose joint optimization depends critically on how reward functions are specified in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) controllers for buildings. Yet reward design remains largely ad hoc: comfort terms are either hand-tuned heuristics or simple temperature-deviation proxies without explicit grounding in thermal-comfort physics. We present PIRS (Physics-Informed Reward Shaping), which replaces these ad-hoc comfort proxies with the ISO 7730 Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) formulation inside a weighted multi-objective reward for Soft Actor-Critic (SAC). By anchoring the comfort signal in the ISO 7730 PMV formulation, PIRS improves reward interpretability and provides a standards-grounded comfort proxy without changing any other component of the learning pipeline. We evaluate PIRS in CityLearn v2.1.2 (challenge 2022 phase 1) with a central SAC agent trained for 50k steps over five random seeds, and compare against a rule-based controller (RBC), a manually engineered reward (E2), an energy-only reward (E3), and a naive temperature-deviation comfort reward (E4). District-level key performance indicators (KPIs), reported as ratios versus RBC, show that PIRS attains cost, carbon, and electricity metrics on par with the manual baseline while substantially outperforming non-physics-grounded designs -- particularly on load ramping (1.78x vs. ~2.4x RBC) and daily peak demand. All DRL policies remain above RBC at this training budget; we interpret this gap honestly and position PIRS as an interpretable, standards-aligned foundation for reward design rather than a claim of dominance over classical control at limited compute.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Reinforcement LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
C-STEP: Continuous Space-Time Empowerment for Physics-informed Safe Reinforcement Learning of Mobile Agents
Safe navigation in complex environments remains a central challenge for reinforcement learning (RL) in robotics. This paper introduces Continuous Space-Time Empowerment for Physics-informed (C-STEP) safe RL, a novel meas…
Reinforcement LearningCollision AvoidancePhysics-Informed Reward Machines
Reward machines (RMs) provide a structured way to specify non-Markovian rewards in reinforcement learning (RL), thereby improving both expressiveness and programmability. Viewed more broadly, they separate what is known …
Reinforcement LearningIntegrating Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Safe Reinforcement Learning in a 1-DoF Helicopter System
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) offers powerful control for industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPSs), but its "black-box" exploration risks violating strict hardware safety limits. Typically, these constraints are man…
Reinforcement LearningPhysics-Informed Machine Learning for Transformer Condition Monitoring -- Part II: Physics-Informed Neural Networks and Uncertainty Quantification
The integration of physics-based knowledge with machine learning models is increasingly shaping the monitoring, diagnostics, and prognostics of electrical transformers. In this two-part series, the first paper introduced…
Active and Passive IRS Jointly Aided Communication: Deployment Design and Achievable Rate
In this letter, we study the wireless point-to-point communication from a transmitter (Tx) to a receiver (Rx), which is jointly aided by an active intelligent reflecting surface (AIRS) and a passive IRS (PIRS). We consid…