Successful Ph.D. graduation of Amirreza Heidari
Ryan Liao © 2023 EPFL
Amirreza Heidari successfully completed his Ph.D. studies at EPFL and shared his work with the public at Smart Living Lab on November 11th, 2022. His work "Reinforcement Learning for occupant-centric operation of building energy systems: Theoretical and experimental investigations" proposed a novel way of closing the gap between the building energy systems and occupants.
The main question of Amirreza Heidari's Ph.D. work was, "How to develop a controller that can perceive and adapt to the occupant behavior to minimize energy use without compromising user needs?" To answer this question, he developed three occupant-centric control frameworks:
- "DeepHot" focused on hot water production in residential buildings;
- "DeepSolar" focused on solar-assisted space heating and hot water production in residential buildings;
- "DeepValve" focused on space heating in offices.
Special attention in all three frameworks was paid to transferability, data efficiency, safety, and minimal use of sensors and actuators.
