Learning scheduling control knowledge through reinforcements

This paper introduces a method of learning search control knowledge in schedule optimization problems through application of reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning is an effective approach for the problem faced by the agent that learns its behavior through trial-and-error interactions with a dynamic environment. Nevertheless, reinforcement learning has a difficulty of slow convergence when applied to the problems with a large state space. The paper discusses the case-based function approximation technique, which makes reinforcement learning applicable to the large scale problems such as a job-shop scheduling problem. To show effectiveness of the approach, reinforcement learning is applied to acquire search control knowledge in repair-based schedule optimization process. Preliminary experiment results show that repair-action selection made by learned search control knowledge succeeded in improving scheduling quality efficiently.