Dynamic Job-Shop Scheduling Based on Transformer and Deep Reinforcement Learning

The dynamic job-shop scheduling problem is a complex and uncertain task that involves optimizing production planning and resource allocation in a dynamic production environment. Traditional methods are limited in effectively handling dynamic events and quickly generating scheduling solutions; in order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a solution by transforming the dynamic job-shop scheduling problem into a Markov decision process and leveraging deep reinforcement learning techniques. The proposed framework introduces several innovative components, which make full use of human domain knowledge and machine computing power, to realize the goal of man-machine collaborative decision-making. Firstly, we utilize disjunctive graphs as the state representation, capturing the complex relationships between various elements of the scheduling problem. Secondly, we select a set of dispatching rules through data envelopment analysis to form the action space, allowing for flexible and efficient scheduling decisions. Thirdly, the transformer model is employed as the feature extraction module, enabling effective capturing of state relationships and improving the representation power. Moreover, the framework incorporates the dueling double deep Q-network with prioritized experience replay, mapping each state to the most appropriate dispatching rule. Additionally, a dynamic target strategy with an elite mechanism is proposed. Through extensive experiments conducted on multiple examples, our proposed framework consistently outperformed traditional dispatching rules, genetic algorithms, and other reinforcement learning methods, achieving improvements of 15.98%, 17.98%, and 13.84%, respectively. These results validate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach in addressing dynamic job-shop scheduling problems.