Cong Zhang

Rongkai Zhang, Cong Zhang, Zhiguang Cao et al.

We propose a manager-worker framework based on deep reinforcement learning to tackle a hard yet nontrivial variant of Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), \ie~multiple-vehicle TSP with time window and rejections (mTSPTWR), where customers who cannot be served before the deadline are subject to rejections. Particularly, in the proposed framework, a manager agent learns to divide mTSPTWR into sub-routing tasks by assigning customers to each vehicle via a Graph Isomorphism Network (GIN) based policy network. A worker agent learns to solve sub-routing tasks by minimizing the cost in terms of both tour length and rejection rate for each vehicle, the maximum of which is then fed back to the manager agent to learn better assignments. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms strong baselines in terms of higher solution quality and shorter computation time. More importantly, the trained agents also achieve competitive performance for solving unseen larger instances.

Cong Zhang, Zhiguang Cao, Wen Song et al.

Recent studies in using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to solve Job-shop scheduling problems (JSSP) focus on construction heuristics. However, their performance is still far from optimality, mainly because the underlying graph representation scheme is unsuitable for modelling partial solutions at each construction step. This paper proposes a novel DRL-guided improvement heuristic for solving JSSP, where graph representation is employed to encode complete solutions. We design a Graph Neural-Network-based representation scheme, consisting of two modules to effectively capture the information of dynamic topology and different types of nodes in graphs encountered during the improvement process. To speed up solution evaluation during improvement, we present a novel message-passing mechanism that can evaluate multiple solutions simultaneously. We prove that the computational complexity of our method scales linearly with problem size. Experiments on classic benchmarks show that the improvement policy learned by our method outperforms state-of-the-art DRL-based methods by a large margin.

Shaodi Feng, Zhuoyi Lin, Jianan Zhou et al.

Deep learning has been extensively explored to solve vehicle routing problems (VRPs), which yields a range of data-driven neural solvers with promising outcomes. However, most neural solvers are trained to tackle VRP instances in a relatively monotonous context, e.g., simplifying VRPs by using Euclidean distance between nodes and adhering to a single problem size, which harms their off-the-shelf application in different scenarios. To enhance their versatility, this paper presents a novel lifelong learning framework that incrementally trains a neural solver to manage VRPs in distinct contexts. Specifically, we propose a lifelong learner (LL), exploiting a Transformer network as the backbone, to solve a series of VRPs. The inter-context self-attention mechanism is proposed within LL to transfer the knowledge obtained from solving preceding VRPs into the succeeding ones. On top of that, we develop a dynamic context scheduler (DCS), employing the cross-context experience replay to further facilitate LL looking back on the attained policies of solving preceding VRPs. Extensive results on synthetic and benchmark instances (problem sizes up to 18k) show that our LL is capable of discovering effective policies for tackling generic VRPs in varying contexts, which outperforms other neural solvers and achieves the best performance for most VRPs.

Cong Zhang, Wen Song, Zhiguang Cao et al.

Priority dispatching rule (PDR) is widely used for solving real-world Job-shop scheduling problem (JSSP). However, the design of effective PDRs is a tedious task, requiring a myriad of specialized knowledge and often delivering limited performance. In this paper, we propose to automatically learn PDRs via an end-to-end deep reinforcement learning agent. We exploit the disjunctive graph representation of JSSP, and propose a Graph Neural Network based scheme to embed the states encountered during solving. The resulting policy network is size-agnostic, effectively enabling generalization on large-scale instances. Experiments show that the agent can learn high-quality PDRs from scratch with elementary raw features, and demonstrates strong performance against the best existing PDRs. The learned policies also perform well on much larger instances that are unseen in training.

Junjie Zhang, Cong Zhang, Neal N. Xiong

Inverse Distance Weighted models (IDW) have been widely used for predicting and modeling multidimensional space in multimodal industrial processes. However, the more complex the structure of multidimensional space, the lower the performance of IDW models, and real industrial datasets tend to have more complex spatial structure. To solve this problem, a new framework for spatial prediction and modeling based on deep reinforcement learning network is proposed. In the proposed framework, the internal relationship between state and action is enhanced by reusing the state values in the Q network, and the convergence rate and stability of the deep reinforcement learning network are improved. The improved deep reinforcement learning network is then used to search for and learn the hyperparameters of each sample point in the inverse distance weighted model. These hyperparameters can reflect the spatial structure of the current industrial dataset to some extent. Then a spatial distribution of hyperparameters is constructed based on the learned hyperparameters. Each interpolation point obtains corresponding hyperparameters from the hyperparametric spatial distribution and brings them into the classical IDW models for prediction, thus achieving differential spatial prediction and modeling. The simulation results show that the proposed framework is suitable for real industrial datasets with complex spatial structure characteristics and is more accurate than current IDW models in spatial prediction.