Going faster to see further: GPU-accelerated value iteration and simulation for perishable inventory control using JAX

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Farrington, Joseph, Li, Kezhi, Wong, Wai Keong, Utley, Martin
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Farrington, Joseph
Li, Kezhi
Wong, Wai Keong
Utley, Martin
author_facet Farrington, Joseph
Li, Kezhi
Wong, Wai Keong
Utley, Martin
contents Value iteration can find the optimal replenishment policy for a perishable inventory problem, but is computationally demanding due to the large state spaces that are required to represent the age profile of stock. The parallel processing capabilities of modern GPUs can reduce the wall time required to run value iteration by updating many states simultaneously. The adoption of GPU-accelerated approaches has been limited in operational research relative to other fields like machine learning, in which new software frameworks have made GPU programming widely accessible. We used the Python library JAX to implement value iteration and simulators of the underlying Markov decision processes in a high-level API, and relied on this library's function transformations and compiler to efficiently utilize GPU hardware. Our method can extend use of value iteration to settings that were previously considered infeasible or impractical. We demonstrate this on example scenarios from three recent studies which include problems with over 16 million states and additional problem features, such as substitution between products, that increase computational complexity. We compare the performance of the optimal replenishment policies to heuristic policies, fitted using simulation optimization in JAX which allowed the parallel evaluation of multiple candidate policy parameters on thousands of simulated years. The heuristic policies gave a maximum optimality gap of 2.49%. Our general approach may be applicable to a wide range of problems in operational research that would benefit from large-scale parallel computation on consumer-grade GPU hardware.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2303_10672
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Going faster to see further: GPU-accelerated value iteration and simulation for perishable inventory control using JAX
Farrington, Joseph
Li, Kezhi
Wong, Wai Keong
Utley, Martin
Artificial Intelligence
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
90C40 (Primary) 90C39, 90B05 (Secondary)
I.2.8; I.6.3; J.3
Value iteration can find the optimal replenishment policy for a perishable inventory problem, but is computationally demanding due to the large state spaces that are required to represent the age profile of stock. The parallel processing capabilities of modern GPUs can reduce the wall time required to run value iteration by updating many states simultaneously. The adoption of GPU-accelerated approaches has been limited in operational research relative to other fields like machine learning, in which new software frameworks have made GPU programming widely accessible. We used the Python library JAX to implement value iteration and simulators of the underlying Markov decision processes in a high-level API, and relied on this library's function transformations and compiler to efficiently utilize GPU hardware. Our method can extend use of value iteration to settings that were previously considered infeasible or impractical. We demonstrate this on example scenarios from three recent studies which include problems with over 16 million states and additional problem features, such as substitution between products, that increase computational complexity. We compare the performance of the optimal replenishment policies to heuristic policies, fitted using simulation optimization in JAX which allowed the parallel evaluation of multiple candidate policy parameters on thousands of simulated years. The heuristic policies gave a maximum optimality gap of 2.49%. Our general approach may be applicable to a wide range of problems in operational research that would benefit from large-scale parallel computation on consumer-grade GPU hardware.
title Going faster to see further: GPU-accelerated value iteration and simulation for perishable inventory control using JAX
topic Artificial Intelligence
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
90C40 (Primary) 90C39, 90B05 (Secondary)
I.2.8; I.6.3; J.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10672