arXiv AI

PORL: Pretrained Offline Reinforcement Learning for the Job Shop Scheduling Problem

The paper introduces PORL, a hybrid method that first trains a general scheduling policy through online reinforcement learning in simulation, then fine‑tunes it offline on production data using a KL‑divergence constraint to limit policy drift. PORL is evaluated on Job Shop Scheduling Problem instances with distribution shifts and various data sources, consistently outperforming standalone offline RL and other baselines, especially when offline data quality is low. The results suggest that offline adaptation of pretrained policies can improve industrial scheduling when direct online exploration is impractical.

arXiv AI
Jun 11

Generalizing Beyond Suboptimality: Offline Reinforcement Learning Learns Effective Scheduling through Random Solutions

arXiv:2509. 10303v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Online reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have demonstrated strong performance on Job Shop Scheduling (JSP) and Flexible JSP (FJSP) problems by learning scheduling policies through direct interaction with simulated environments.

By Jesse van Remmerden, Zaharah Bukhsh, Yingqian Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 17

Reinforcement Learning-Based Production Scheduling in an Industry-Based Coating Scenario Using the Digital Model Playground

arXiv:2608. 14122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production scheduling in complex manufacturing environments is challenging when sequence-dependent setup times, stochastic disturbances, and due-date constraints must be addressed simultaneously.

By Arne Kr\"oger, Ralf Buscherm\"ohle, Wilhelm Hasselbring, Henrik Wilbers
arXiv AI
Jun 11

Offline Diffusion Policy for Multi-User Delay-Constrained Scheduling

arXiv:2501. 12942v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective multi-user delay-constrained scheduling is crucial in various real-world applications, including embodied AI, instant messaging, live streaming, and data center management, where efficient resource allocation is required among users with diverse delay sensitivities.

By Zhuoran Li, Ruishuo Chen, Hai Zhong, Longbo Huang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Variational Approach for Job Shop Scheduling

The paper introduces Variational Graph-to-Scheduler (VG2S), a framework that applies variational inference to the Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP). By decoupling representation learning from policy optimization using a variational graph encoder and an ELBO-based objective, VG2S improves training stability and robustness to hyperparameter changes. Experiments show that VG2S outperforms state‑of‑the‑art deep reinforcement learning baselines and traditional dispatching rules, especially on large‑scale benchmark instances such as DMU and SWV.

By Seung Heon Oh, Jiwon Baek, Hyunjin Oh, Kiyoung Cho, Heechang Yoon, Jong Hun Woo