Distributed Control of Partial Differential Equations Using Convolutional Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a convolutional reinforcement learning framework for distributed control of PDE-governed systems, reducing complexity and enabling scalable, transferable control strategies with minimal computational resources.

Contribution

It proposes a novel convolutional approach that exploits translational invariance and finite velocity information transport to simplify distributed PDE control problems.

Findings

Effective stabilization of PDE systems demonstrated

Framework scales easily to larger or different domains

Low computational resource requirements achieved

Abstract

We present a convolutional framework which significantly reduces the complexity and thus, the computational effort for distributed reinforcement learning control of dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). Exploiting translational invariances, the high-dimensional distributed control problem can be transformed into a multi-agent control problem with many identical, uncoupled agents. Furthermore, using the fact that information is transported with finite velocity in many cases, the dimension of the agents' environment can be drastically reduced using a convolution operation over the state space of the PDE. In this setting, the complexity can be flexibly adjusted via the kernel width or by using a stride greater than one. Moreover, scaling from smaller to larger systems -- or the transfer between different domains -- becomes a straightforward task requiring little effort. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework using several PDE examples with increasing complexity, where stabilization is achieved by training a low-dimensional deep deterministic policy gradient agent using minimal computing resources.