Ethical Smart Grid: a Gym environment for learning ethical behaviours

The ethical-smart-grid package is a reinforcement learning (RL) simulator of a smart grid, based on Gym (Brockman et al., 2016). It focuses on learning ethical behaviours, i.e., behaviours that include ethical considerations, and are aligned with moral values. The simulated smart grid is composed of multiple agents representing inhabitants, which have to learn how to consume and distribute energy while taking into account several ethical considerations, such as the equity of comforts between inhabitants. This simulator is somewhat simplified compared to existing (co-)simulators (Karnouskos & De Holanda, 2009; Mihal et al., 2022; Oliveira et al., 2012; Vogt et al., 2018); it focuses instead on the ethical aspects. In other words, agents that have been trained on this environment could not be deployed in a real-world smart grid, yet this package still serves as a suitable environment for learning ethical behaviours.