Optimal Scheduling in IoT-Driven Smart Isolated Microgrids Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we investigate the scheduling issue of diesel generators (DGs) in an Internet of Things (IoT)-Driven isolated microgrid (MG) by deep reinforcement learning (DRL). The renewable energy is fully exploited under the uncertainty of renewable generation and load demand. The DRL agent learns an optimal policy from history renewable and load data of previous days, where the policy can generate real-time decisions based on observations of past renewable and load data of previous hours collected by connected sensors. The goal is to reduce operating cost on the premise of ensuring supply-demand balance. In specific, a novel finite-horizon partial observable Markov decision process (POMDP) model is conceived considering the spinning reserve. In order to overcome the challenge of discrete-continuous hybrid action space due to the binary DG switching decision and continuous energy dispatch (ED) decision, a DRL algorithm, namely the hybrid action finite-horizon RDPG (HAFH-RDPG), is proposed. HAFH-RDPG seamlessly integrates two classical DRL algorithms, i.e., deep Q-network (DQN) and recurrent deterministic policy gradient (RDPG), based on a finite-horizon dynamic programming (DP) framework. Extensive experiments are performed with real-world data in an IoT-driven MG to evaluate the capability of the proposed algorithm in handling the uncertainty due to inter-hour and inter-day power fluctuation and to compare its performance with those of the benchmark algorithms.

Joint Energy Dispatch and Unit Commitment in Microgrids Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Nowadays, the application of microgrids (MG) with renewable energy is becoming more and more extensive, which creates a strong need for dynamic energy management. In this paper, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is applied to learn an optimal policy for making joint energy dispatch (ED) and unit commitment (UC) decisions in an isolated MG, with the aim for reducing the total power generation cost on the premise of ensuring the supply-demand balance. In order to overcome the challenge of discrete-continuous hybrid action space due to joint ED and UC, we propose a DRL algorithm, i.e., the hybrid action finite-horizon DDPG (HAFH-DDPG), that seamlessly integrates two classical DRL algorithms, i.e., deep Q-network (DQN) and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), based on a finite-horizon dynamic programming (DP) framework. Moreover, a diesel generator (DG) selection strategy is presented to support a simplified action space for reducing the computation complexity of this algorithm. Finally, the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm is verified through comparison with several baseline algorithms by experiments with real-world data set.

Federated Reinforcement Learning: Techniques, Applications, and Open Challenges

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL), an emerging and promising field in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Starting with a tutorial of Federated Learning (FL) and RL, we then focus on the introduction of FRL as a new method with great potential by leveraging the basic idea of FL to improve the performance of RL while preserving data-privacy. According to the distribution characteristics of the agents in the framework, FRL algorithms can be divided into two categories, i.e. Horizontal Federated Reinforcement Learning (HFRL) and Vertical Federated Reinforcement Learning (VFRL). We provide the detailed definitions of each category by formulas, investigate the evolution of FRL from a technical perspective, and highlight its advantages over previous RL algorithms. In addition, the existing works on FRL are summarized by application fields, including edge computing, communication, control optimization, and attack detection. Finally, we describe and discuss several key research directions that are crucial to solving the open problems within FRL.

Patent Analytics Based on Feature Vector Space Model: A Case of IoT

The number of approved patents worldwide increases rapidly each year, which requires new patent analytics to efficiently mine the valuable information attached to these patents. Vector space model (VSM) represents documents as high-dimensional vectors, where each dimension corresponds to a unique term. While originally proposed for information retrieval systems, VSM has also seen wide applications in patent analytics, and used as a fundamental tool to map patent documents to structured data. However, VSM method suffers from several limitations when applied to patent analysis tasks, such as loss of sentence-level semantics and curse-of-dimensionality problems. In order to address the above limitations, we propose a patent analytics based on feature vector space model (FVSM), where the FVSM is constructed by mapping patent documents to feature vectors extracted by convolutional neural networks (CNN). The applications of FVSM for three typical patent analysis tasks, i.e., patents similarity comparison, patent clustering, and patent map generation are discussed. A case study using patents related to Internet of Things (IoT) technology is illustrated to demonstrate the performance and effectiveness of FVSM. The proposed FVSM can be adopted by other patent analysis studies to replace VSM, based on which various big data learning tasks can be performed.