Predictive Mobile Refueling for Agricultural Machinery via Deep Reinforcement Learning

With the advancement of agricultural modernization, agricultural machinery is widely used for crop harvesting. Traditionally, agricultural machines must be refueled at gas stations regularly, affecting the harvesting efficiency. A mobile refueling service has emerged in recent years, in which refueling tankers can move to serve the refueling request. However, the current mobile refueling system is still in an on-demand mode, which may not achieve timely response. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new mobile refueling mode, i.e., predictive mobile refueling. To tackle the challenge of sparse rewards in predictive mobile refueling, we develop a two-stage reinforcement learning-based scheduling strategy MobRef, which decouples the scheduling process into a central request dispatcher and a distributed tanker reposition scheduler, and further introduces a potential energy-based reward shaping function to facilitate the training of the reposition scheduler. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MobRef, which outperforms the best baseline by 12.71% on average. We also present a deployed system based on MobRef, which is used internally in China National Petroleum Corporation.