Vivian Wen Hui Wong

Vivian W. H. Wong, Sang Hun Kim, Junyoung Park et al.

The interrupting swap-allowed blocking job shop problem (ISBJSSP) is a complex scheduling problem that is able to model many manufacturing planning and logistics applications realistically by addressing both the lack of storage capacity and unforeseen production interruptions. Subjected to random disruptions due to machine malfunction or maintenance, industry production settings often choose to adopt dispatching rules to enable adaptive, real-time re-scheduling, rather than traditional methods that require costly re-computation on the new configuration every time the problem condition changes dynamically. To generate dispatching rules for the ISBJSSP problem, we introduce a dynamic disjunctive graph formulation characterized by nodes and edges subjected to continuous deletions and additions. This formulation enables the training of an adaptive scheduler utilizing graph neural networks and reinforcement learning. Furthermore, a simulator is developed to simulate interruption, swapping, and blocking in the ISBJSSP setting. Employing a set of reported benchmark instances, we conduct a detailed experimental study on ISBJSSP instances with a range of machine shutdown probabilities to show that the scheduling policies generated can outperform or are at least as competitive as existing dispatching rules with predetermined priority. This study shows that the ISBJSSP, which requires real-time adaptive solutions, can be scheduled efficiently with the proposed method when production interruptions occur with random machine shutdowns.

Vivian Wen Hui Wong, Max Ferguson, Kincho H. Law et al.

Segmentation of additive manufacturing (AM) defects in X-ray Computed Tomography (XCT) images is challenging, due to the poor contrast, small sizes and variation in appearance of defects. Automatic segmentation can, however, provide quality control for additive manufacturing. Over recent years, three-dimensional convolutional neural networks (3D CNNs) have performed well in the volumetric segmentation of medical images. In this work, we leverage techniques from the medical imaging domain and propose training a 3D U-Net model to automatically segment defects in XCT images of AM samples. This work not only contributes to the use of machine learning for AM defect detection but also demonstrates for the first time 3D volumetric segmentation in AM. We train and test with three variants of the 3D U-Net on an AM dataset, achieving a mean intersection of union (IOU) value of 88.4%.