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.
arXiv:2607. 02941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-product kitting delivery imposes significant challenges for real-time scheduling in hybrid manufacturing systems that integrate processing and assembly, as dynamic order arrivals simultaneously alter supply dependencies and the set of feasible job-machine assignments.
arXiv:2604. 23841v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficiently solving the Job Shop Scheduling Problem in real-world industrial applications requires policies that are both computationally lean and topologically robust.
The paper investigates curriculum learning for graph neural network-based reinforcement learning applied to the job shop scheduling problem. By training policies on progressively larger instances (from 20×20 up to 30×30), the authors demonstrate that this approach reduces training time and improves performance compared to single-size training. Evaluation on unseen instances from 8×8 to 30×30 shows that curriculum learning lowers the mean optimality gap by about 8–9 percentage points and saves roughly 50 hours of training time at the largest target size.
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:2606. 13682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The open shop scheduling problem (OSSP) arises in many industrial and service settings but remains computationally challenging as the number of jobs and machines increases.
The paper introduces a novel end‑to‑end, size‑agnostic graph reinforcement learning framework for the one‑dimensional bin packing problem (1D‑BPP). It models packing as a Markov decision process on an item‑compatibility graph, where a graph neural network actor‑critic policy learns to merge compatible partial bins. Empirical results on the BPPLIB benchmark show that the learned policy reduces the mean optimality gap of a constructive heuristic from 2.66 % to 2.31 %, performs competitively against other learned methods, and outperforms a state‑of‑the‑art learned solver on the hardest benchmark family.
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.
arXiv:2607. 19985v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamic manufacturing environments require multi-agent systems to coordinate effectively under frequent operational disturbances such as machine failures, urgent job arrivals, and processing time variations.
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.
arXiv:2608. 03041v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches for flexible job shop scheduling (FJSP) heavily rely on attention-centric architectures to achieve state-of-the-art performance.
arXiv:2607. 11725v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prefabricated prefinished volumetric construction moves most building work into module factories, whose production floor operates as a flexible job shop.
arXiv:2604. 24117v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient job-shop scheduling with transportation resources is critical for high-performance manufacturing.