Year: 2024
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The integration of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with heuristic methods is an emerging trend for solving optimization problems, which leverages RL's ability to learn from the data generated during the search process. One promising approach is to train an RL agent as an improvement heuristic, starting with a suboptimal solution that is iteratively improved by applying small changes. We apply this approach to a real-world multiobjective production scheduling problem. Our approach utilizes a network architecture that includes Transformer encoding to learn the relationships between jobs. Afterwards, a probability matrix is generated from which pairs of jobs are sampled and then swapped to improve the solution. We benchmarked our approach against other heuristics using real data from our industry partner, demonstrating its superior performance.
Authors: Arthur Müller, Lukas Vollenkemper
Language: English
Subfield: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4408145811