arXiv:2510. 01475v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Model Predictive Control (MPC) has demonstrated significant performance improvements over today's control methods for residential Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC), but deploying MPC often requires substantial engineering effort.
arXiv:2607. 27914v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-zone variable-air-volume control must balance thermal comfort, indoor air quality, and electricity use across several continuous actuators.
arXiv:2607. 12856v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Buildings are expected to shift cooling loads in response to grid conditions.
arXiv:2608. 09453v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On--off cycling is the main cause of compressor wear in residential heat pumps, yet reinforcement learning (RL) controllers for buildings typically optimise only energy cost and thermal comfort, ignoring how much the learned policy cycles.
Buildings account for roughly one-third of global energy consumption and CO$_2$ emissions. Optimizing indoor climate systems plays a critical role for urban climate mitigation aligned with UN Sustainable Development Goals 11 and 13.
arXiv:2409. 19716v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Constrained Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a significant research area within RL, where integrating constraints with rewards is crucial for enhancing safety and performance across diverse control tasks.
The paper introduces NOMAD‑RL, a reinforcement learning controller for HVAC systems that learns to adapt across diverse thermal zones via a universal thermostat interface. It employs an adaptive domain randomization scheme using physics‑informed normalizing flows to generate realistic, multimodal training data, enabling the recurrent policy to handle partial observability. Experiments show NOMAD‑RL outperforms constant‑setpoint PID and non‑randomized RL, and rivals well‑tuned model predictive control, especially in multi‑zone scenarios.
arXiv:2608. 19804v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Buildings account for roughly one-third of global energy consumption and CO$_2$ emissions.
The paper presents a zero‑shot model predictive control (MPC) approach for buildings that uses excitation‑based generalized transfer learning models. By pretraining on purposefully probed operational data from multiple source buildings, the authors demonstrate that these models achieve superior control performance in 32 simulated target buildings, outperforming both an online linear MPC and a PI controller. This method eliminates the need for target‑specific data, reducing setup cost and facilitating broader deployment of energy‑efficient MPC in the building sector.
The paper reviews 66 studies on large language models (LLMs) applied to HVAC operations in building energy systems, categorizing them by application and method families and evaluating their evidence realism and deployment readiness. It finds that most work focuses on building energy modelling, with only four studies reaching pilot-level evidence and none reporting sustained operational deployment. LLMs are currently best suited as semantic and workflow layers—such as point‑name normalisation and document‑grounded operator support—rather than autonomous HVAC controllers, and future research should target field‑validated benchmarks and safe, low‑latency LLM‑MPC/RL integrations.
arXiv:2606. 02049v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The increasing integration of renewable energy sources into power systems, particularly in buildings equipped with photovoltaic (PV) panels and energy storage systems, introduces significant complexity in energy systems.
arXiv:2607. 16534v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved strong results in control, yet learned policies remain brittle to changes in dynamics, action spaces, observation spaces, or goals, a critical limitation for real-world deployment.
arXiv:2606. 01665v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We quantify the energy floor -- the minimum achievable cost given action space constraints -- for Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) HVAC control on the sbsim calibrated building simulator.