Deep reinforcement learning for dynamic scheduling of a flexible job shop

The ability to handle unpredictable dynamic events is becoming more important in pursuing agile and flexible production scheduling. At the same time, the cyber-physical convergence in production system creates massive amounts of industrial data that needs to be mined and analysed in real-time. To facilitate such real-time control, this research proposes a hierarchical and distributed architecture to solve the dynamic flexible job shop scheduling problem. Double Deep Q-Network algorithm is used to train the scheduling agents, to capture the relationship between production information and scheduling objectives, and make real-time scheduling decisions for a flexible job shop with constant job arrivals.…