Manufacturing Resource Scheduling Based on Deep Q-Network

To optimize machine allocation and task dispatching in smart manufacturing factories, this paper proposes a manufacturing resource scheduling framework based on reinforcement learning (RL). The framework formulates the entire scheduling process as a multi-stage sequential decision problem, and further obtains the scheduling order by the combination of deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and improved deep Q-network (DQN). Specifically, with respect to the representation of the Markov decision process (MDP), the feature matrix is considered as the state space and a set of heuristic dispatching rules are denoted as the action space. In addition, the deep CNN is employed to approximate the state-action values, and the double dueling deep Q-network with prioritized experience replay and noisy network (D3QPN2) is adopted to determine the appropriate action according to the current state. In the experiments, compared with the traditional heuristic method, the proposed method is able to learn high-quality scheduling policy and achieve shorter makespan on the standard public datasets.