Disentangling the Octopus: Towards Decomposing Reinforcement Learning Systems in to Intuitive Subsystems

Abstract

As electric vehicles have surged in popularity, the problem of ensuring that there issufficient infrastructure to charge them has attracted large amounts of interest. A key component of this is leveraging existing electric vehicle charging station capacity by intelligently recommending drivers to nearby open stations so they can recharge quickly. Greedily approaching such recommendations can quickly lead to long wait times, so this thesis proposes a method using reinforcement learning to provide recommendations to drivers. While common deep reinforcement learning models fail, exploiting regularities in the state space allows the problem to be decomposed in to smaller problems that can be modeled separately. Experiments demonstrate that this method not only decreases the time before vehicles can start charging by up to 47%, but also that decomposing the problem allows recommendations to be given 2.5x faster than other deep learning based models.