Paper ID: 2211.07357

Controlling Commercial Cooling Systems Using Reinforcement Learning

Jerry Luo, Cosmin Paduraru, Octavian Voicu, Yuri Chervonyi, Scott Munns, Jerry Li, Crystal Qian, Praneet Dutta, Jared Quincy Davis, Ningjia Wu, Xingwei Yang, Chu-Ming Chang, Ted Li, Rob Rose, Mingyan Fan, Hootan Nakhost, Tinglin Liu, Brian Kirkman, Frank Altamura, Lee Cline, Patrick Tonker, Joel Gouker, Dave Uden, Warren Buddy Bryan, Jason Law, Deeni Fatiha, Neil Satra, Juliet Rothenberg, Mandeep Waraich, Molly Carlin, Satish Tallapaka, Sims Witherspoon, David Parish, Peter Dolan, Chenyu Zhao, Daniel J. Mankowitz

This paper is a technical overview of DeepMind and Google's recent work on reinforcement learning for controlling commercial cooling systems. Building on expertise that began with cooling Google's data centers more efficiently, we recently conducted live experiments on two real-world facilities in partnership with Trane Technologies, a building management system provider. These live experiments had a variety of challenges in areas such as evaluation, learning from offline data, and constraint satisfaction. Our paper describes these challenges in the hope that awareness of them will benefit future applied RL work. We also describe the way we adapted our RL system to deal with these challenges, resulting in energy savings of approximately 9% and 13% respectively at the two live experiment sites.

Submitted: Nov 11, 2022