Efficient control policies enable industrial companies to increase their profitability by maximizing productivity while reducing unscheduled downtime and energy consumption. Finding optimal control policies is a complex task because physical systems, such as chemical reactors and wind turbines, are often hard to model and because drift in process dynamics can cause performance to deteriorate over time. Offline reinforcement learning is a control strategy that allows industrial companies to build control policies entirely from historical data without the need for an explicit process model. This approach does not require interaction with the process directly in an exploration stage, which removes one of the barriers for the adoption of reinforcement learning in safety-critical applications. In this post, we will build an end-to-end solution to find optimal control policies using only historical data on Amazon SageMaker using Ray’s RLlib library. To learn more about reinforcement learning, see Use Reinforcement Learning with Amazon SageMaker.

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