The paper proposes a two-stage personalized thermal comfort system that combines multimodal physiological and environmental sensing with reinforcement learning for decision-making. It aims to move beyond static HVAC setpoints and generic comfort models by tailoring thermal interventions to individual physiological variability. The approach seeks to improve occupant wellbeing and enable more responsive building-control strategies.
As part of HVAC systems, residential heating provides foundational infrastructure for human habitation in cold weather. However, research on how residents interact with HVAC systems, particularly heat...
arXiv:2609.23508v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As part of HVAC systems, residential heating provides foundational infrastructure for human habitation in cold weather. However, research on how resi...
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.
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.
arXiv:2608. 19804v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Buildings account for roughly one-third of global energy consumption and CO$_2$ emissions.
arXiv:2608. 11324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper proposes a contextual quality-diversity evolutionary reinforcement-learning controller, CQD-ERL, for the supervisory control of a tropical, water-cooled chiller plant and its associated air side.
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: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:2605. 31044v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning has shown promising results for optimizing the control of industrial energy systems, yet most existing studies remain limited to the application in simulation environments.
arXiv:2607. 03176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding how households consume electricity in response to socioeconomic and climatic drivers is important for decision-makers designing energy policies in a changing climate and under geopolitical tensions.
arXiv:2608. 15309v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous multimodal sensing now allows human physiology to be observed throughout daily life rather than only during occasional clinical visits.