5 research outputs found
Batch Reinforcement Learning on the Industrial Benchmark: First Experiences
The Particle Swarm Optimization Policy (PSO-P) has been recently introduced
and proven to produce remarkable results on interacting with academic
reinforcement learning benchmarks in an off-policy, batch-based setting. To
further investigate the properties and feasibility on real-world applications,
this paper investigates PSO-P on the so-called Industrial Benchmark (IB), a
novel reinforcement learning (RL) benchmark that aims at being realistic by
including a variety of aspects found in industrial applications, like
continuous state and action spaces, a high dimensional, partially observable
state space, delayed effects, and complex stochasticity. The experimental
results of PSO-P on IB are compared to results of closed-form control policies
derived from the model-based Recurrent Control Neural Network (RCNN) and the
model-free Neural Fitted Q-Iteration (NFQ). Experiments show that PSO-P is not
only of interest for academic benchmarks, but also for real-world industrial
applications, since it also yielded the best performing policy in our IB
setting. Compared to other well established RL techniques, PSO-P produced
outstanding results in performance and robustness, requiring only a relatively
low amount of effort in finding adequate parameters or making complex design
decisions
A Benchmark Environment Motivated by Industrial Control Problems
In the research area of reinforcement learning (RL), frequently novel and
promising methods are developed and introduced to the RL community. However,
although many researchers are keen to apply their methods on real-world
problems, implementing such methods in real industry environments often is a
frustrating and tedious process. Generally, academic research groups have only
limited access to real industrial data and applications. For this reason, new
methods are usually developed, evaluated and compared by using artificial
software benchmarks. On one hand, these benchmarks are designed to provide
interpretable RL training scenarios and detailed insight into the learning
process of the method on hand. On the other hand, they usually do not share
much similarity with industrial real-world applications. For this reason we
used our industry experience to design a benchmark which bridges the gap
between freely available, documented, and motivated artificial benchmarks and
properties of real industrial problems. The resulting industrial benchmark (IB)
has been made publicly available to the RL community by publishing its Java and
Python code, including an OpenAI Gym wrapper, on Github. In this paper we
motivate and describe in detail the IB's dynamics and identify prototypic
experimental settings that capture common situations in real-world industry
control problems
A Benchmark Environment Motivated by Industrial Control Problems
In the research area of reinforcement learning (RL), frequently novel and
promising methods are developed and introduced to the RL community. However,
although many researchers are keen to apply their methods on real-world
problems, implementing such methods in real industry environments often is a
frustrating and tedious process. Generally, academic research groups have only
limited access to real industrial data and applications. For this reason, new
methods are usually developed, evaluated and compared by using artificial
software benchmarks. On one hand, these benchmarks are designed to provide
interpretable RL training scenarios and detailed insight into the learning
process of the method on hand. On the other hand, they usually do not share
much similarity with industrial real-world applications. For this reason we
used our industry experience to design a benchmark which bridges the gap
between freely available, documented, and motivated artificial benchmarks and
properties of real industrial problems. The resulting industrial benchmark (IB)
has been made publicly available to the RL community by publishing its Java and
Python code, including an OpenAI Gym wrapper, on Github. In this paper we
motivate and describe in detail the IB's dynamics and identify prototypic
experimental settings that capture common situations in real-world industry
control problems