ACM e-Energy · 2025

Learning-Augmented Online Control for Decarbonizing Water Infrastructures

Jianyi Yang, Pengfei Li, Tongxin Li, Adam Wierman, Shaolei Ren

ACM International Conference on Future and Sustainable Energy Systems

Can learned pump control reduce carbon costs while meeting safety constraints?

LAOC restricts online decisions to safe action sets while exploiting learned predictions for pump scheduling. Analysis characterizes the relationship between safety requirements and operating costs, with a building water supply case study.

Research themes

Connections

Guarantees meet physical infrastructure

Aggregate flexibility communicates feasible actions for coordinated charging. Robust dispatch and safe water control connect performance guarantees to operational costs and physical constraints.

Open questions

Coordinated low carbon infrastructure

Can distributed energy and water resources adapt together under changing conditions?

Explore open directions

Cite this paper

Jianyi Yang, Pengfei Li, Tongxin Li, Adam Wierman, Shaolei Ren. Learning-Augmented Online Control for Decarbonizing Water Infrastructures. ACM International Conference on Future and Sustainable Energy Systems, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1145/3679240.3734595

BibTeX
@inproceedings{tongxin-water-control,
  title = {{Learning-Augmented Online Control for Decarbonizing Water Infrastructures}},
  author = {Jianyi Yang and Pengfei Li and Tongxin Li and Adam Wierman and Shaolei Ren},
  year = {2025},
  booktitle = {ACM International Conference on Future and Sustainable Energy Systems},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3679240.3734595},
  doi = {10.1145/3679240.3734595}
}
2025Environmental Data Science

Robust machine-learned algorithms for efficient grid operation

Nicolas Christianson, Christopher Yeh, Tongxin Li, Mehdi Hosseini, Mahdi Torabi Rad, Azarang Golmohammadi, Adam Wierman

RobustML combines a learned dispatch algorithm with a bound on worst case cost. A combined cycle cogeneration case study examines dispatch and ramping costs as renewable penetration increases, including performance under distribution shift.

Can learned dispatch policies remain reliable under distribution shift? AI for energy electric vehicle charging demand response renewable energy load forecasting decarbonization learning augmented algorithms algorithms with predictions competitive analysis robustness consistency online optimization model predictive control MPC stability recursive feasibility distributed control system level synthesis
2021POMACS

Information Aggregation for Constrained Online Control

Tongxin Li, Yue Chen, Bo Sun, Adam Wierman, Steven Low

Entropic aggregation summarizes a local controller's feasible actions for a remote decision maker. Penalized Predictive Control can approach the regret of full information control under causal invariance and a sufficiently long prediction window.

How much feasibility information must a local controller share? model predictive control MPC stability recursive feasibility distributed control system level synthesis information theory graph learning sample complexity compressed sensing graph neural networks Riemannian geometry AI for energy electric vehicle charging demand response renewable energy load forecasting decarbonization
2021IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid

Learning-Based Predictive Control via Real-Time Aggregate Flexibility

Tongxin Li, Bo Sun, Yue Chen, Zixin Ye, Steven H. Low, Adam Wierman

Maximum entropy feedback summarizes the feasible actions of controllable loads. Reinforcement learning approximates this feedback for Penalized Predictive Control, reducing information and computation requirements. Charging data demonstrates the coordination approach.

How can an aggregator communicate flexibility in real time? model predictive control MPC stability recursive feasibility distributed control system level synthesis AI for energy electric vehicle charging demand response renewable energy load forecasting decarbonization large language models LLM agents contextual control world models reinforcement learning dueling bandits