Deep Reinforcement Learning for room temperature control: a black-box pipeline from data to policies

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) recently emerged as a possibility to control complex systems without the need to model them. However, since weeks long experiments are needed to assess the performance of a building controller, people still have to rely on accurate simulation environments to train and tune DRL agents in tractable amounts of time before deploying them, shifting the burden back to the original issue of designing complex models. In this work, we show that it is possible to learn control policies on simple black-box linear room temperature models, thereby alleviating the heavy engineering usually required to build accurate surrogates. We develop a black-box pipeline, where historical data is taken as input to produce room temperature control policies. The trained DRL agents are capable of beating industrial rule-based controllers both in terms of energy consumption and comfort satisfaction, using novel penalties to introduce expert knowledge, i.e. to incentivize agents to follow expected behaviors, in the reward function. Moreover, one of the best agents was deployed on a real building for one week and was able to save energy while maintaining adequate comfort levels, indicating that low-complexity models might be enough to learn control policies that perform well on real buildings.