Reinforcement learning and stochastic dynamic programming for jointly scheduling jobs and preventive maintenance on a single machine to minimise earliness-tardiness
研究了单机环境下可恢复作业与预防性维护的随机联合调度问题，提出随机动态规划和注意力深度强化学习两种方法，后者相比前者总成本节省高达30.5%，计算时间从67分钟降至1秒以内，鲁棒性更优。
This paper addresses the problem of stochastic jointly scheduling of resumable jobs and preventive maintenance on a single machine, subject to random breakdowns, to minimise the earliness-tardiness cost. The main objective is to investigate using trending machine learning-based methods compared to stochastic optimisation approaches. We propose two different methods from both fields as we solve the same problem firstly with a stochastic dynamic programming model in an approximation way, then with an attention-based deep reinforcement learning model. We conduct a detailed experimental study according to solution quality, run time, and robustness to analyse their performances compared to those of an existing approach in the literature as a baseline. Both algorithms outperform the baseline. Moreover, the machine learning-based algorithm outperforms the stochastic dynamic programming-based heuristic as we report up to 30.5% saving in total cost, a reduction of computational time from 67 min to less than 1s on big instances, and a better robustness. These facts highlight clearly its potential for solving such problems.