A brief tutorial on event-based optimization with applications in smart buildings

Event-based optimization provides a general formulation for many control, decision-making, and optimization problems. In this paper, we briefly review the key ideas of event-based optimization, and some recent development in this area, including establishing the relationship between event-based optimization and partially observable Markov decision process, approximate event-based optimization based on policy projections, event-based policy improvement, and the applications in smart buildings. We hope this review brings insight to simulation-based optimization in more general situations.