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On the Study of Curriculum Learning for Inferring Dispatching Policies on the Job Shop Scheduling
IJCAI International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
  • Zangir Iklassov, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
  • Dmitrii Medvedev, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
  • Ruben Solozabal Ochoa de Retana, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
  • Martin Takac, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Abstract

This paper studies the use of Curriculum Learning on Reinforcement Learning (RL) to improve the performance of the dispatching policies learned on the Job-shop Scheduling Problem (JSP). Current works in the literature present a large optimality gap when learning end-to-end solutions on this problem. In this regard, we identify the difficulty for RL to learn directly on large instances as part of the issue and use Curriculum Learning (CL) to mitigate this effect. Particularly, CL sequences the learning process in a curriculum of increasing complexity tasks, which allows learning on large instances that otherwise would be impossible to learn from scratch. In this paper, we present a size-agnostic model that enables us to demonstrate that current curriculum strategies have a major impact on the quality of the solution inferred. In addition, we introduce a novel Reinforced Adaptive Staircase Curriculum Learning (RASCL) strategy, which adjusts the difficulty level during the learning process by revisiting the worst-performing instances. Conducted experiments on Taillard's and Demirkol's datasets show that the presented approach significantly improves the current state-of-the-art models on the JSP. It reduces the average optimality gap from 19.35% to 10.46% on Taillard's instances and from 38.43% to 18.85% on Demirkol's instances.

DOI
10.24963/ijcai.2023/594
Publication Date
8-1-2023
Keywords
  • Planning and Scheduling,
  • PS,
  • Learning in planning and scheduling
Comments

IR conditions: non-described

Conference proceeding available at IJCAI site

Citation Information
Z. Iklassov, D. Medvedev, R.S.O. de Retana, and M. Takac, "On the Study of Curriculum Learning for Inferring Dispatching Policies on the Job Shop Scheduling", in 32nd Intl Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2023), Macao, vol 2023-August, pp. 5350-5358, Aug 2023. doi:10.24963/ijcai.2023/594