Flexible Job Shop Scheduling via Dual Attention Network-Based Reinforcement Learning

Runqing Wang, Gang Wang, Jian Sun*, Fang Deng, Jie Chen

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Flexible manufacturing has given rise to complex scheduling problems such as the flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP). In FJSP, operations can be processed on multiple machines, leading to intricate relationships between operations and machines. Recent works have employed deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to learn priority dispatching rules (PDRs) for solving FJSP. However, the quality of solutions still has room for improvement relative to that by the exact methods such as OR-Tools. To address this issue, this article presents a novel end-to-end learning framework that weds the merits of self-attention models for deep feature extraction and DRL for scalable decision-making. The complex relationships between operations and machines are represented precisely and concisely, for which a dual-attention network (DAN) comprising several interconnected operation message attention blocks and machine message attention blocks is proposed. The DAN exploits the complicated relationships to construct production-adaptive operation and machine features to support high-quality decision-making. Experimental results using synthetic data as well as public benchmarks corroborate that the proposed approach outperforms both traditional PDRs and the state-of-the-art DRL method. Moreover, it achieves results comparable to exact methods in certain cases and demonstrates favorable generalization ability to large-scale and real-world unseen FJSP tasks.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)3091-3102
Number of pages12
JournalIEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
Volume35
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Mar 2024

Keywords

  • Deep reinforcement learning (DRL)
  • flexible job-shop scheduling
  • graph attention networks (GATs)
  • self-attention mechanism

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