On-Policy Reinforcement-Learning Control for Optimal Energy Sharing and Temperature Regulation in District Heating Systems

We address the problem of temperature regulation and optimal energy sharing in district heating systems (DHSs) where the demand and system parameters are unknown. We propose a temperature regulation scheme that employs data-driven on-policy updates that achieve these objectives. In particular, we show that the proposed control scheme converges to an optimal equilibrium point of the system, while also having guaranteed convergence to an optimal LQR control policy, thus providing good transient performance. The efficiency of our approach is also demonstrated through extensive simulations.