Getting Started with eprllib

There are various ways to classify control methods, one of which is learning-based approaches, such as Reinforcement Learning (RL). In scenarios where multiple agents operate simultaneously in an environment, they can take actions, receive observations, and obtain rewards from it. This interaction is utilized to learn an optimal policy that maps observations to actions. The general scheme of RL can be seen in the following image.

During the learning process, an algorithm attempts to predict the cumulative reward that the agents will receive if they follow a certain policy. This prediction is represented by a Value function V(obs) or an Action-Value function Q(obs,act). A modern approach to predicting the V or Q functions involves using deep neural networks (DNN) to approximate these values. When DNNs are used, the methodology is referred to as Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), and the DNN model is known as the policy.

In eprllib, we use EnergyPlus to model the environment and RLlib as a framework for DRL to train, evaluate, save, and restore policies.

Running a simple experiment with eprllib and RLlib

Work in progres…