Energy Management for Microgrids: a Reinforcement Learning Approach

Abstract : This paper presents a framework based on reinforcement learning for energy management and economic dispatch of an islanded microgrid without any forecasting module. The architecture of the algorithm is divided in two parts: a learning phase trained by a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm on a small dataset and the testing phase based on a decision tree induced from the trained RL. An advantage of this approach is to create an autonomous agent, able to react in real-time, considering only the past. This framework was tested on real data acquired at Ecole Polytechnique in France over a long period of time, with a large diversity in the type of days considered. It showed near optimal, efficient and stable results in each situation.