Opposition-Based Reinforcement Learning in the Management of Water Resources

Opposition-based learning (OBL) is a new scheme in machine intelligence. In this paper, an OBL version Q-learning which exploits opposite quantities to accelerate the learning is used for management of single reservoir operations. In this method, an agent takes an action, receives reward, and updates its knowledge in terms of action-value functions. Furthermore, the transition function which is the balance equation in the optimization model determines the next state and updates the action-value function pertinent to opposite action. Two type of opposite actions will be defined. It will be demonstrated that using OBL can significantly improve the efficiency of the operating policy within limited iterations. It is also shown that this technique is more robust than Q-Learning