Learning Efficient and Fair Policies for Uncertainty-Aware Collaborative Human-Robot Order Picking

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Smit, Igor G., Bukhsh, Zaharah, Pechenizkiy, Mykola, Alogariastos, Kostas, Hendriks, Kasper, Zhang, Yingqian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Smit, Igor G.
Bukhsh, Zaharah
Pechenizkiy, Mykola
Alogariastos, Kostas
Hendriks, Kasper
Zhang, Yingqian
author_facet Smit, Igor G.
Bukhsh, Zaharah
Pechenizkiy, Mykola
Alogariastos, Kostas
Hendriks, Kasper
Zhang, Yingqian
contents In collaborative human-robot order picking systems, human pickers and Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) travel independently through a warehouse and meet at pick locations where pickers load items onto the AMRs. In this paper, we consider an optimization problem in such systems where we allocate pickers to AMRs in a stochastic environment. We propose a novel multi-objective Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach to learn effective allocation policies to maximize pick efficiency while also aiming to improve workload fairness amongst human pickers. In our approach, we model the warehouse states using a graph, and define a neural network architecture that captures regional information and effectively extracts representations related to efficiency and workload. We develop a discrete-event simulation model, which we use to train and evaluate the proposed DRL approach. In the experiments, we demonstrate that our approach can find non-dominated policy sets that outline good trade-offs between fairness and efficiency objectives. The trained policies outperform the benchmarks in terms of both efficiency and fairness. Moreover, they show good transferability properties when tested on scenarios with different warehouse sizes. The implementation of the simulation model, proposed approach, and experiments are published.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_08006
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Efficient and Fair Policies for Uncertainty-Aware Collaborative Human-Robot Order Picking
Smit, Igor G.
Bukhsh, Zaharah
Pechenizkiy, Mykola
Alogariastos, Kostas
Hendriks, Kasper
Zhang, Yingqian
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
In collaborative human-robot order picking systems, human pickers and Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) travel independently through a warehouse and meet at pick locations where pickers load items onto the AMRs. In this paper, we consider an optimization problem in such systems where we allocate pickers to AMRs in a stochastic environment. We propose a novel multi-objective Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach to learn effective allocation policies to maximize pick efficiency while also aiming to improve workload fairness amongst human pickers. In our approach, we model the warehouse states using a graph, and define a neural network architecture that captures regional information and effectively extracts representations related to efficiency and workload. We develop a discrete-event simulation model, which we use to train and evaluate the proposed DRL approach. In the experiments, we demonstrate that our approach can find non-dominated policy sets that outline good trade-offs between fairness and efficiency objectives. The trained policies outperform the benchmarks in terms of both efficiency and fairness. Moreover, they show good transferability properties when tested on scenarios with different warehouse sizes. The implementation of the simulation model, proposed approach, and experiments are published.
title Learning Efficient and Fair Policies for Uncertainty-Aware Collaborative Human-Robot Order Picking
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.08006