An Adaptive Reinforcement Learning-Based Scheduling Approach with Combination Rules for Mixed-Line Job Shop Production

Abstract

Affected by economic globalization and market diversification, more manufacturing enterprises realize that large-scale production cannot adapt to the current market environment. The new trend of multivariety customized mixed-line production brings a higher level of disturbances and uncertainties to production planning. Traditional methods cannot be directly applied to the classic flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP). Therefore, this paper presents an adaptive scheduling method for mixed-line job shop scheduling. First, the scheduling problem caused by combined processing constraints is studied and transformed by introducing the definition of virtual operation. According to the situation of the coexistence of trial-production and batch production, the disturbance processing mechanism is established. And a scheduling decision model is established based on contextual bands (CBs) in reinforcement learning to overcome the shortcoming of poor performance of traditional single dispatching rule strategy. Through continuous trial and error learning, each scheduler can select the most suitable scheduling rules according to the environment state. Finally, we benchmark the performance of the scheduling algorithm with scheduling methods based on a variety of single scheduling rules. The results show that the proposed algorithm not only improves the performance in the mixed production scheduling problem but also effectively copes with emergency trial-production orders.