OfficeLearn: An OpenAI Gym Environment for Building Level Energy Demand Response (Papers Track)
Lucas Spangher (U.C. Berkeley); Akash Gokul (University of California at Berkeley); Utkarsha Agwan (U.C. Berkeley); Joseph Palakapilly (UC Berkeley); Manan Khattar (University of California at Berkeley); Akaash Tawade (University of California at Berkeley); Costas J. Spanos (University of California at Berkeley)
Abstract
Energy Demand Response (DR) will play a crucial role in balancing renewable energy generation with demand as grids decarbonize. There is growing interest in developing Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to optimize DR pricing, as pricing set by electric utilities often cannot take behavioral irrationality into account. However, so far, attempts to standardize RL efforts in this area do not exist. In this paper, we present a first of the kind OpenAI gym environment for testing DR with occupant level building dynamics. We demonstrate the variety of parameters built into our office environment allowing the researcher to customize a building to meet their specifications of interest. We hope that this work enables future work in DR in buildings.