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New PIRS method enhances building energy management with physics-informed rewards

Researchers have developed PIRS (Physics-Informed Reward Shaping), a novel method for optimizing building energy management using deep reinforcement learning. PIRS replaces ad-hoc comfort proxies with the ISO 7730 Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) formulation, grounding comfort signals in established physics. This approach enhances reward interpretability and provides a standards-aligned comfort proxy without altering other learning pipeline components. Evaluations in CityLearn v2.1.2 demonstrated that PIRS achieves performance comparable to manual baselines in cost, carbon, and electricity metrics, while significantly outperforming non-physics-grounded designs, particularly in load ramping and daily peak demand. AI

IMPACT This research offers a more interpretable and standards-aligned approach to reward design in reinforcement learning for energy management systems.

RANK_REASON The cluster contains an academic paper detailing a new method for AI-based building energy management. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]

Read on arXiv cs.AI →

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New PIRS method enhances building energy management with physics-informed rewards

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The cluster contains an academic paper detailing a new method for AI-based building energy management. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]
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COVERAGE [1]

  1. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Shadmehr Zaregarizi, Khashayar Yavari ·

    PIRS: Physics-Informed Reward Shaping for SAC-Based Building Energy Management

    arXiv:2605.28232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Occupant comfort and grid-aware energy efficiency are competing objectives whose joint optimization depends critically on how reward functions are specified in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) controllers for buildings. Yet reward …