A smart grid facilitates more effective energy management of an electrical grid system. Because both energy consumption and associated building operation costs are increasing rapidly around the world, the need for flexible and cost-effective management of the energy used by buildings in a smart grid environment is increasing. In this paper, we consider an energy management system for a smart energy building connected to an external grid (utility) as well as distributed energy resources including a renewable energy source, energy storage system, and vehicle-to-grid station. First, the energy management system is modeled using a Markov decision process that completely describes the state, action, transition probability, and rewards of the system. Subsequently, a reinforcement-learning-based energy management algorithm is proposed to reduce the operation energy costs of the target smart energy building under unknown future information. The results of numerical simulation based on the data measured in real environments show that the proposed energy management algorithm gradually reduces energy costs via learning processes compared to other random and non-learning-based algorithms.

Network slicing to create multiple virtual networks, called network slice, is a promising technology to enable networking resource sharing among multiple tenants for the 5th generation (5G) networks. By offering a network slice to slice tenants, network slicing supports parallel services to meet the service level agreement (SLA). In legacy networks, every tenant pays a fixed and roughly estimated monthly or annual fee for shared resources according to a contract signed with a provider. However, such a fixed resource allocation mechanism may result in low resource utilization or violation of user quality of service (QoS) due to fluctuations in the network demand. To address this issue, we introduce a resource management system for network slicing and propose a dynamic resource adjustment algorithm based on reinforcement learning approach from each tenant’s point of view. First, the resource management for network slicing is modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) with the state space, action space, and reward function. Then, we propose a Q-learning-based dynamic resource adjustment algorithm that aims at maximizing the profit of tenants while ensuring the QoS requirements of end-users. The numerical simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly increase the profit of tenants compared to existing fixed resource allocation methods while satisfying the QoS requirements of end-users.