A fuzzy reinforcement learning approach to thermal unit commitment problem

Unit commitment problem (UCP) aims at optimizing generation cost for meeting a given load demand under several operational constraints. We propose to use fuzzy reinforcement learning (RL) approach for efficient and reliable solution to the unit commitment problem. In particular, we cast UCP as a multiagent fuzzy reinforcement learning task wherein individual generators act as players for optimizing the cost to meet a given load over a twenty-four-hour period. Unit commitment task has been fuzzified, and the most optimal unit commitment solution is generated by employing RL on this fuzzy multigenerator setup. Our proposed multiagent RL framework does not assume any a priori task or system knowledge, and the generators gradually learn to produce most optimal output solely based on their collective generation. We look at the UCP as a sequential decision-making task with reward/penalty to reduce the collective generation cost of generators. To the best of our knowledge, ours is a first attempt at solving UCP by employing fuzzy reinforcement learning. We test our approach on a ten-generating-unit system with several equality and inequality constraints. Simulation results and comparisons against several recent UCP solution methods prove superiority and viability of our proposed multiagent fuzzy reinforcement learning technique.