Solving the flexible job-shop scheduling problem through an enhanced deep reinforcement learning approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Echeverria, Imanol, Murua, Maialen, Santana, Roberto
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Echeverria, Imanol
Murua, Maialen
Santana, Roberto
author_facet Echeverria, Imanol
Murua, Maialen
Santana, Roberto
contents In scheduling problems common in the industry and various real-world scenarios, responding in real-time to disruptive events is essential. Recent methods propose the use of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to learn policies capable of generating solutions under this constraint. The objective of this paper is to introduce a new DRL method for solving the flexible job-shop scheduling problem, particularly for large instances. The approach is based on the use of heterogeneous graph neural networks to a more informative graph representation of the problem. This novel modeling of the problem enhances the policy's ability to capture state information and improve its decision-making capacity. Additionally, we introduce two novel approaches to enhance the performance of the DRL approach: the first involves generating a diverse set of scheduling policies, while the second combines DRL with dispatching rules (DRs) constraining the action space. Experimental results on two public benchmarks show that our approach outperforms DRs and achieves superior results compared to three state-of-the-art DRL methods, particularly for large instances.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_15706
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Solving the flexible job-shop scheduling problem through an enhanced deep reinforcement learning approach
Echeverria, Imanol
Murua, Maialen
Santana, Roberto
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
In scheduling problems common in the industry and various real-world scenarios, responding in real-time to disruptive events is essential. Recent methods propose the use of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to learn policies capable of generating solutions under this constraint. The objective of this paper is to introduce a new DRL method for solving the flexible job-shop scheduling problem, particularly for large instances. The approach is based on the use of heterogeneous graph neural networks to a more informative graph representation of the problem. This novel modeling of the problem enhances the policy's ability to capture state information and improve its decision-making capacity. Additionally, we introduce two novel approaches to enhance the performance of the DRL approach: the first involves generating a diverse set of scheduling policies, while the second combines DRL with dispatching rules (DRs) constraining the action space. Experimental results on two public benchmarks show that our approach outperforms DRs and achieves superior results compared to three state-of-the-art DRL methods, particularly for large instances.
title Solving the flexible job-shop scheduling problem through an enhanced deep reinforcement learning approach
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15706