Hybrid Offline/Online Optimization for Energy Management via Reinforcement Learning

This repository contains the code to reproduce the experiments of the paper Hybrid Offline/Online Optimization for Energy Management via Reinforcement Learning under review at CPAIOR-2022 conference.

Script description

• online_heuristic.py: utility functions to evaluate the solutions and invoke the simple greedy heuristic.
• plotting.py: utility functions to make plots shown in the paper.
• tests.py: this script contains the functions to train and test the different methods.
• utility.py: simple utility functions, like pre-processing.
• vpp_envs.py: gym environments for the VPP.

Data folder description

• Dataset10k.csv: photovoltaic production and user load demand forecasts with 15 minutes resolution. Each pair of forecast is called an instance. There are 10,000 instances in the dataset which is obtained from https://www.enwl.co.uk/lvns.
• gmePrices.npy: demand electricity hourly obtained based on data from the Italian national energy market management corporation (GME).
• optShift.npy: optimal day-ahead load demand shifts.

Run the experiments

The experiments can be run launching the tests.py script. The arguments are the following:

• logdir: logging and model directory.
• --mode: training or test.
• --method: you can choose among the following methods:
  • hybrid-single-step: this is referred to as single-step in the paper;
  • hybrid-mdp: this is referred to as mdp in the paper;
  • rl-single-step: end-to-end RL approach which directly provides the decision variables for all the stages;
  • rl-mdp: this is referred to as rl in the paper.

The training routine is performed by the train_rl_algo method whereas the test is performed by the test_rl_algo method. Please, be sure to have a data with the following files:

• Dataset10k.csv
• gmePrices.npy
• optShift.npy

which have been described in the previous section.

test_rl_algo method saves the solution or virtual costs (depending on the employed algorithm) in the logdir folder with name respectively solution.npy and cvirt.npy as numpy.array.

To evaluate and visualize the solutions/virtual costs, run the online_heuristic.py script: which has the following arguments:

• instance_filepath: user demand and RES productions forecasting filepath.
• shifts_filepath: optimal shifts filepath.
• prices_filepath: Electricity Market prices filepath.
• solution_filepath: Virtual costs or solution filepath.
• mode: rl or hybrid; If rl is selected then you have to directly provide a solution; if hybrid is provided then you have to provide the virtual costs.
• instance_id: instance index in the instances file.
• savepath: where the solution and its cost are saved to.
• --display: display the solution and cost.

Issue

Currently, there is an issue with the garage library. If the test.py script in launched in the the same directory of the git repository then the following execption is raised TypeError: CreateProcess() argument 8 must be str or None, not bytes. Please, run the code in separate directory from the git repository. Sorry for the inconvenience. The experiments were run on Windows 10 OS.