Developing Robust Digital Twins and Reinforcement Learning for Accelerator Control Systems at the Fermilab Booster

Abstract: We describe the offline ML development for an effort to precisely regulate the Gradient Magnet Power Supply (GMPS) at the Fermilab Booster accelerator complex via a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). As part of this effort, we created a digital twin of the Booster-GMPS control system by training a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to capture its full dynamics. We outline the path we took to carefully validate our digital twin before deploying it as a reinforcement learning (RL) environment. Additionally, we demonstrate the use of a Deep Q-Network (DQN) policy model with the capability to regulate the GMPS against realistic time-varying perturbations.