{"slug": "contextual-quality-diversity-evolutionary-reinforcement-learning-for-hvac-in", "title": "Contextual Quality-Diversity Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning for HVAC Control in Tropical Commercial Buildings", "summary": "Researchers propose CQD-ERL, a contextual quality-diversity evolutionary reinforcement-learning controller for HVAC control in tropical commercial buildings, which maintains a product archive of specialized policies indexed by operating context and behavior descriptor, filtered through a deterministic safety shield. Trained on a reduced-order environment representing a Singapore commercial building, it is evaluated over a full annual backtest against an ASHRAE Guideline 36 baseline.", "body_md": "arXiv:2608.11324v1 Announce Type: new\nAbstract: This paper proposes a contextual quality-diversity evolutionary reinforcement-learning controller, CQD-ERL, for the supervisory control of a tropical, water-cooled chiller plant and its associated air side. Rather than converging to a single scalarised policy, the controller maintains a product archive of specialised policies indexed jointly by a data- driven operating context, a cluster of daily weather and load regime, and a context-invariant behaviour descriptor, filled by a gradient-free evolutionary operator and a soft-actor-critic policy-gradient operator that share one replay buffer. Every action is filtered through a deterministic safety shield before execution. The controller is trained on a two-tier reduced-order environment representing the latent load, cooling-tower approach and humidity constraints of a Singapore commercial building, and is evaluated over a full annual backtest against an ASHRAE Guideline 36 baseline.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/contextual-quality-diversity-evolutionary-reinforcement-learning-for-hvac-in", "canonical_source": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11324", "published_at": "2026-08-13 04:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-13 04:14:31.878029+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["machine-learning", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["CQD-ERL", "ASHRAE Guideline 36", "Singapore"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/contextual-quality-diversity-evolutionary-reinforcement-learning-for-hvac-in", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/contextual-quality-diversity-evolutionary-reinforcement-learning-for-hvac-in.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/contextual-quality-diversity-evolutionary-reinforcement-learning-for-hvac-in.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/contextual-quality-diversity-evolutionary-reinforcement-learning-for-hvac-in.jsonld"}}