Deep Reinforcement Learning for Flexible Job Shop Scheduling with Random Job Arrivals

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tang, Yu, Zakwan, Muhammad, Balta, Efe, Lygeros, John, Rupenyan, Alisa
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Tang, Yu
Zakwan, Muhammad
Balta, Efe
Lygeros, John
Rupenyan, Alisa
author_facet Tang, Yu
Zakwan, Muhammad
Balta, Efe
Lygeros, John
Rupenyan, Alisa
contents The Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem (FJSP) is the optimal allocation of a set of jobs to machines. Two primary challenges persist in FJSP: the unpredictable arrival of future jobs and the combinatorial complexity of the problem, rendering it intractable for conventional mixed-integer linear programming solvers. This paper proposes an event-based \gls{DRL} approach to solve FJSP with random job arrivals. Specifically, we employ the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm and use lightweight Multi-Layer Perceptrons to train the \gls{DRL} agent for minimizing the total completion time of all jobs. We design the state representation to be directly accessible from the environment, and limit the learning agent to selecting from among a set of well-established dispatching rules. Simulations show that our \gls{DRL} approach outperforms any of the individual dispatching rules on datasets with varying heterogeneity and job arrival rates. We benchmark our \gls{DRL} against an arrival-triggered mixed-integer linear programming solution and show that our method achieves good performance especially when the datasets are heterogeneous.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_22773
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep Reinforcement Learning for Flexible Job Shop Scheduling with Random Job Arrivals
Tang, Yu
Zakwan, Muhammad
Balta, Efe
Lygeros, John
Rupenyan, Alisa
Artificial Intelligence
Optimization and Control
The Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem (FJSP) is the optimal allocation of a set of jobs to machines. Two primary challenges persist in FJSP: the unpredictable arrival of future jobs and the combinatorial complexity of the problem, rendering it intractable for conventional mixed-integer linear programming solvers. This paper proposes an event-based \gls{DRL} approach to solve FJSP with random job arrivals. Specifically, we employ the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm and use lightweight Multi-Layer Perceptrons to train the \gls{DRL} agent for minimizing the total completion time of all jobs. We design the state representation to be directly accessible from the environment, and limit the learning agent to selecting from among a set of well-established dispatching rules. Simulations show that our \gls{DRL} approach outperforms any of the individual dispatching rules on datasets with varying heterogeneity and job arrival rates. We benchmark our \gls{DRL} against an arrival-triggered mixed-integer linear programming solution and show that our method achieves good performance especially when the datasets are heterogeneous.
title Deep Reinforcement Learning for Flexible Job Shop Scheduling with Random Job Arrivals
topic Artificial Intelligence
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22773