Refined Thompson Learning for Adaptive Bandits: Power-Efficient Flexibility Scheduling Across Data Centers
Yifu Ding, Zixi Chen, Ruicheng Ao, David Simchi-Levi, Thomas Magnanti
The rapid growth of large-scale AI workloads in data centers has placed increasing pressure on power grids in recent years. Since power systems must continuously balance supply and demand, there is growing interest in leveraging data-center workload flexibility as a grid service. We propose a contextual restless multi-armed bandit (CRMAB) framework in which a grid operator requests load reductions without observing internal job-scheduling decisions. Under an index-ability guarantee, each data center or physical machine is modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP) over a cyclic virtual-machine (VM) job queue, with unknown rewards and transition dynamics that are learned online using Thompson sampling and Whittle-index policies. To improve learning under sparse and noisy observations, the framework augments an adaptive Thompson--Whittle (TW) policy with domain-informed transition priors and gated prior mixing. In baseline experiments, the best refined adaptive variant achieves 91.4\% of the oracle reward after 100 rounds and 96.8\% after 1,000 rounds. Across a 16-setting stress test spanning different state-space sizes and levels of contextual feature noise, the best refined variant consistently outperforms the original TW policy with high confidence while remaining competitive with EXP4. A graph-based prior further incorporates data-center hardware constraints, including operating frequency and computing-resource limits. Overall, our results demonstrate the economic potential of data-center flexibility as a grid service and highlight the importance of high-quality, open-source AI workload traces for developing and evaluating such services.
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