Reinforcement Learning-based Approach for Vehicle-to-Building Charging with Heterogeneous Agents and Long Term Rewards

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel reinforcement learning framework combining DDPG with action masking and MILP guidance to optimize vehicle-to-building energy management, achieving cost savings and meeting charging demands in complex, real-world scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable RL approach that effectively handles continuous actions, multi-agent dynamics, and long-term rewards for V2B energy management, outperforming existing methods.

Findings

Outperforms baseline and heuristic methods in cost reduction

Successfully manages long-term energy demand and charging requirements

Demonstrates scalability and generalization in real-world data

Abstract

Strategic aggregation of electric vehicle batteries as energy reservoirs can optimize power grid demand, benefiting smart and connected communities, especially large office buildings that offer workplace charging. This involves optimizing charging and discharging to reduce peak energy costs and net peak demand, monitored over extended periods (e.g., a month), which involves making sequential decisions under uncertainty and delayed and sparse rewards, a continuous action space, and the complexity of ensuring generalization across diverse conditions. Existing algorithmic approaches, e.g., heuristic-based strategies, fall short in addressing real-time decision-making under dynamic conditions, and traditional reinforcement learning (RL) models struggle with large state-action spaces, multi-agent settings, and the need for long-term reward optimization. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel RL framework that combines the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient approach (DDPG) with action masking and efficient MILP-driven policy guidance. Our approach balances the exploration of continuous action spaces to meet user charging demands. Using real-world data from a major electric vehicle manufacturer, we show that our approach comprehensively outperforms many well-established baselines and several scalable heuristic approaches, achieving significant cost savings while meeting all charging requirements. Our results show that the proposed approach is one of the first scalable and general approaches to solving the V2B energy management challenge.