Engineering Commons^™

A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach With Prioritized Experience Replay And Importance Factor For Makespan Minimization In Manufacturing, Jose Napoleon Martinez

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this research, we investigated the application of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to a common manufacturing scheduling optimization problem, max makespan minimization. In this application, tasks are scheduled to undergo processing in identical processing units (for instance, identical machines, machining centers, or cells). The optimization goal is to assign the jobs to be scheduled to units to minimize the maximum processing time (i.e., makespan) on any unit.

Machine learning methods have the potential to "learn" structures in the distribution of job times that could lead to improved optimization performance and time over traditional optimization methods, as well as to adapt …