A Meta-Learning Approach for Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning in Sustainable Home Environments

Effective residential appliance scheduling is crucial for sustainable living. While multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) has proven effective in balancing user preferences in appliance scheduling, traditional MORL struggles with limited data in non-stationary residential settings characterized by renewable generation variations. Significant context shifts that can invalidate previously learned policies. To address these challenges, we extend state-of-the-art MORL algorithms with the meta-learning paradigm, enabling rapid, few-shot adaptation to shifting contexts. Additionally, we employ an auto-encoder (AE)-based unsupervised method to detect environment context changes. We have also developed a residential energy environment to evaluate our method using real-world data from London residential settings. This study not only assesses the application of MORL in residential appliance scheduling but also underscores the effectiveness of meta-learning in energy management. Our top-performing method significantly surpasses the best baseline, while the trained model saves 3.28% on electricity bills, a 2.74% increase in user comfort, and a 5.9% improvement in expected utility. Additionally, it reduces the sparsity of solutions by 62.44%. Remarkably, these gains were accomplished using 96.71% less training data and 61.1% fewer training steps.

Reinforcement Learning Enabled Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading for Dairy Farms

Farm businesses are increasingly adopting renewables to enhance energy efficiency and reduce reliance on fossil fuels and the grid. This shift aims to decrease dairy farms' dependence on traditional electricity grids by enabling the sale of surplus renewable energy in Peer-to-Peer markets. However, the dynamic nature of farm communities poses challenges, requiring specialized algorithms for P2P energy trading. To address this, the Multi-Agent Peer-to-Peer Dairy Farm Energy Simulator (MAPDES) has been developed, providing a platform to experiment with Reinforcement Learning techniques. The simulations demonstrate significant cost savings, including a 43% reduction in electricity expenses, a 42% decrease in peak demand, and a 1.91% increase in energy sales compared to baseline scenarios lacking peer-to-peer energy trading or renewable energy sources.

Demonstration Guided Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) is increasingly relevant due to its resemblance to real-world scenarios requiring trade-offs between multiple objectives. Catering to diverse user preferences, traditional reinforcement learning faces amplified challenges in MORL. To address the difficulty of training policies from scratch in MORL, we introduce demonstration-guided multi-objective reinforcement learning (DG-MORL). This novel approach utilizes prior demonstrations, aligns them with user preferences via corner weight support, and incorporates a self-evolving mechanism to refine suboptimal demonstrations. Our empirical studies demonstrate DG-MORL's superiority over existing MORL algorithms, establishing its robustness and efficacy, particularly under challenging conditions. We also provide an upper bound of the algorithm's sample complexity.

A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Dairy Farm Battery Management using Q Learning

Dairy farming consumes a significant amount of energy, making it an energy-intensive sector within agriculture. Integrating renewable energy generation into dairy farming could help address this challenge. Effective battery management is important for integrating renewable energy generation. Managing battery charging and discharging poses significant challenges because of fluctuations in electrical consumption, the intermittent nature of renewable energy generation, and fluctuations in energy prices. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to significantly improve the use of renewable energy in dairy farming, however, there is limited research conducted in this particular domain. This research considers Ireland as a case study as it works towards attaining its 2030 energy strategy centered on the utilization of renewable sources. This study proposes a Q-learning-based algorithm for scheduling battery charging and discharging in a dairy farm setting. This research also explores the effect of the proposed algorithm by adding wind generation data and considering additional case studies. The proposed algorithm reduces the cost of imported electricity from the grid by 13.41\%, peak demand by 2\%, and 24.49\% when utilizing wind generation. These results underline how reinforcement learning is highly effective in managing batteries in the dairy farming sector.

Go-Explore for Residential Energy Management

Reinforcement learning is commonly applied in residential energy management, particularly for optimizing energy costs. However, RL agents often face challenges when dealing with deceptive and sparse rewards in the energy control domain, especially with stochastic rewards. In such situations, thorough exploration becomes crucial for learning an optimal policy. Unfortunately, the exploration mechanism can be misled by deceptive reward signals, making thorough exploration difficult. Go-Explore is a family of algorithms which combines planning methods and reinforcement learning methods to achieve efficient exploration. We use the Go-Explore algorithm to solve the cost-saving task in residential energy management problems and achieve an improvement of up to 19.84\% compared to the well-known reinforcement learning algorithms.

Inferring Preferences from Demonstrations in Multi-Objective Residential Energy Management

It is often challenging for a user to articulate their preferences accurately in multi-objective decision-making problems. Demonstration-based preference inference (DemoPI) is a promising approach to mitigate this problem. Understanding the behaviours and values of energy customers is an example of a scenario where preference inference can be used to gain insights into the values of energy customers with multiple objectives, e.g. cost and comfort. In this work, we applied the state-of-art DemoPI method, i.e., the dynamic weight-based preference inference (DWPI) algorithm in a multi-objective residential energy consumption setting to infer preferences from energy consumption demonstrations by simulated users following a rule-based approach. According to our experimental results, the DWPI model achieves accurate demonstration-based preference inferring in three scenarios. These advancements enhance the usability and effectiveness of multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) in energy management, enabling more intuitive and user-friendly preference specifications, and opening the door for DWPI to be applied in real-world settings.

Modelling Electricity Consumption in Irish Dairy Farms Using Agent-Based Modelling

Dairy farming can be an energy intensive form of farming. Understanding the factors affecting electricity consumption on dairy farms is crucial for farm owners and energy providers. In order to accurately estimate electricity demands in dairy farms, it is necessary to develop a model. In this research paper, an agent-based model is proposed to model the electricity consumption of Irish dairy farms. The model takes into account various factors that affect the energy consumption of dairy farms, including herd size, number of milking machines, and time of year. The outputs are validated using existing state-of-the-art dairy farm modelling frameworks. The proposed agent-based model is fully explainable, which is an advantage over other Artificial Intelligence techniques, e.g. deep learning.

Reinforcement Learning for Battery Management in Dairy Farming

Dairy farming is a particularly energy-intensive part of the agriculture sector. Effective battery management is essential for renewable integration within the agriculture sector. However, controlling battery charging/discharging is a difficult task due to electricity demand variability, stochasticity of renewable generation, and energy price fluctuations. Despite the potential benefits of applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to renewable energy in the context of dairy farming, there has been limited research in this area. This research is a priority for Ireland as it strives to meet its governmental goals in energy and sustainability. This research paper utilizes Q-learning to learn an effective policy for charging and discharging a battery within a dairy farm setting. The results demonstrate that the developed policy significantly reduces electricity costs compared to the established baseline algorithm. These findings highlight the effectiveness of reinforcement learning for battery management within the dairy farming sector.

Evolving Multi-Objective Neural Network Controllers for Robot Swarms

Many swarm robotics tasks consist of multiple conflicting objectives. This research proposes a multi-objective evolutionary neural network approach to developing controllers for swarms of robots. The swarm robot controllers are trained in a low-fidelity Python simulator and then tested in a high-fidelity simulated environment using Webots. Simulations are then conducted to test the scalability of the evolved multi-objective robot controllers to environments with a larger number of robots. The results presented demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively control each of the robots. The robot swarm exhibits different behaviours as the weighting for each objective is adjusted. The results also confirm that multi-objective neural network controllers evolved in a low-fidelity simulator can be transferred to high-fidelity simulated environments and that the controllers can scale to environments with a larger number of robots without further retraining needed.

Evolutionary Strategy Guided Reinforcement Learning via MultiBuffer Communication

Evolutionary Algorithms and Deep Reinforcement Learning have both successfully solved control problems across a variety of domains. Recently, algorithms have been proposed which combine these two methods, aiming to leverage the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses of both approaches. In this paper we introduce a new Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning model which combines a particular family of Evolutionary algorithm called Evolutionary Strategies with the off-policy Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm TD3. The framework utilises a multi-buffer system instead of using a single shared replay buffer. The multi-buffer system allows for the Evolutionary Strategy to search freely in the search space of policies, without running the risk of overpopulating the replay buffer with poorly performing trajectories which limit the number of desirable policy behaviour examples thus negatively impacting the potential of the Deep Reinforcement Learning within the shared framework. The proposed algorithm is demonstrated to perform competitively with current Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning algorithms on MuJoCo control tasks, outperforming the well known state-of-the-art CEM-RL on 3 of the 4 environments tested.