We explore the use of deep reinforcement learning to provide strategies for long term scheduling of hydropower production. We consider a use-case where the aim is to optimise the yearly revenue given week-by-week inflows to the reservoir and electricity prices. The challenge is to decide between immediate water release at the spot price of electricity and storing the water for later power production at an unknown price, given constraints on the system. We successfully train a soft actor-critic algorithm on a simplified scenario with historical data from the Nordic power market. The presented model is not ready to substitute traditional optimisation tools but demonstrates the complementary potential of reinforcement learning in the data-rich field of hydropower scheduling.
Multiobjective Hydropower Reservoir Operation Optimization with Transformer-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning
College of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Deptartment of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Lassonde School of Engineering, York University（约克大学拉桑德工程学院电气与计算机工程系）
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
With the rapid development of deep learning, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) began to appear in the field of resource scheduling in recent years. Based on the previous research on DRL in the literature, we introduce online resource scheduling algorithm DeepRM2 and the offline resource scheduling algorithm DeepRM_Off. Compared with the state-of-the-art DRL algorithm DeepRM and heuristic algorithms, our proposed algorithms have faster convergence speed and better scheduling efficiency with regarding to average slowdown time, job completion time and rewards.
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.（华为技术有限公司）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
A novel simulator called VMAgent is introduced to help RL researchers better explore new methods, especially for virtual machine scheduling. VMAgent is inspired by practical virtual machine (VM) scheduling tasks and provides an efficient simulation platform that can reflect the real situations of cloud computing. Three scenarios (fading, recovering, and expansion) are concluded from practical cloud computing and corresponds to many reinforcement learning challenges (high dimensional state and action spaces, high non-stationarity, and life-long demand). VMAgent provides flexible configurations …
US Air Force-MIT AI Accelerator（美国空军-麻省理工学院人工智能加速器）；MIT（麻省理工学院）
Integer programs provide a powerful abstraction for representing a wide range of real-world scheduling problems. Despite their ability to model general scheduling problems, solving large-scale integer programs (IP) remains a computational challenge in practice. The incorporation of more complex objectives such as robustness to disruptions further exacerbates the computational challenge. We present NICE (Neural network IP Coefficient Extraction), a novel technique that combines reinforcement learning and integer programming to tackle the problem of robust scheduling. More specifically, NICE use…
University of California, Irvine（加利福尼亚大学欧文分校）；University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）
Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL) algorithms such as Soft Q-Learning (SQL) and Soft Actor-Critic trade off reward and policy entropy, which has the potential to improve training stability and robustness. Most MaxEnt RL methods, however, use a constant tradeoff coefficient (temperature), contrary to the intuition that the temperature should be high early in training to avoid overfitting to noisy value estimates and decrease later in training as we increasingly trust high value estimates to truly lead to good rewards. Moreover, our confidence in value estimates is state-dependen…
Tracking Drift: Variation-Aware Entropy Scheduling for Non-Stationary Reinforcement Learning
School of Future Technology, Southeast University, Nanjing, China（东南大学未来技术学院，南京，中国）；School of Automation, Southeast University, Nanjing, China（东南大学自动化学院，南京，中国）
Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；School of Intelligent Systems Science and Engineering, Jinan University（暨南大学智能系统科学与工程学院）
The dynamic job-shop scheduling problem (DJSP) is a class of scheduling tasks that specifically consider the inherent uncertainties such as changing order requirements and possible machine breakdown in realistic smart manufacturing settings. Since traditional methods cannot dynamically generate effective scheduling strategies in face of the disturbance of environments, we formulate the DJSP as a Markov decision process (MDP) to be tackled by reinforcement learning (RL). For this purpose, we propose a flexible hybrid framework that takes disjunctive graphs as states and a set of general dispatc…
Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院）；Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室）；Northern Illinois University（北伊利诺伊大学）
Cluster scheduler is crucial in high-performance computing (HPC). It determines when and which user jobs should be allocated to available system resources. Existing cluster scheduling heuristics are developed by human experts based on their experience with specific HPC systems and workloads. However, the increasing complexity of computing systems and the highly dynamic nature of application workloads have placed tremendous burden on manually designed and tuned scheduling heuristics. More aggressive optimization and automation are needed for cluster scheduling in HPC. In this work, we present a…
Safe Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for CubeSat Task Scheduling Based on Energy Consumption
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg (UL)（卢森堡大学跨学科安全、可靠性与信任中心（SnT））；Automation and Robotics Research Group (ARG)（自动化与机器人研究组）；Space Systems Research Group (SpaSys)（空间系统研究组）
Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, Tsinghua University（清华大学清华-伯克利深圳学院）
This paper addresses the problem of optimizing charging/discharging schedules of electric vehicles (EVs) when participate in demand response (DR). As there exist uncertainties in EVs' remaining energy, arrival and departure time, and future electricity prices, it is quite difficult to make charging decisions to minimize charging cost while guarantee that the EV's battery state-of-the-charge (SOC) is within certain range. To handle with this dilemma, this paper formulates the EV charging scheduling problem as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). By synergistically combining the augment…
TCS Research, New Delhi（塔塔咨询服务公司研究部（TCS Research），新德里）
In this paper we present Meeting Bot, a reinforcement learning based conversational system that interacts with multiple users to schedule meetings. The system is able to interpret user utterences and map them to preferred time slots, which are then fed to a reinforcement learning (RL) system with the goal of converging on an agreeable time slot. The RL system is able to adapt to user preferences and environmental changes in meeting arrival rate while still scheduling effectively. Learning is performed via policy gradient with exploration, by utilizing an MLP as an approximator of the policy fu…
Deep Reinforcement Learning Guided Improvement Heuristic for Job Shop Scheduling
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Institute of Marine Science and Technology, Shandong University（山东大学海洋科学与技术研究院）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）
For decades, system administrators have been striving to design and tune cluster scheduling policies to improve the performance of high performance computing (HPC) systems. However, the increasingly complex HPC systems combined with highly diverse workloads make such manual process challenging, time-consuming, and error-prone. We present a reinforcement learning based HPC scheduling framework named DRAS-CQSim to automatically learn optimal scheduling policy. DRAS-CQSim encapsulates simulation environments, agents, hyperparameter tuning options, and different reinforcement learning algorithms, …
Center for Cyber Cognitive Intelligence (CCI), Fraunhofer IPA（弗劳恩霍夫制造工程与自动化研究所网络认知智能中心）；Institute of Industrial Manufacturing and Management IFF, University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学工业制造与管理研究所）
Maintenance scheduling is a complex decision-making problem in the production domain, where a number of maintenance tasks and resources has to be assigned and scheduled to production entities in order to prevent unplanned production downtime. Intelligent maintenance strategies are required that are able to adapt to the dynamics and different conditions of production systems. The paper introduces a deep reinforcement learning approach for condition-oriented maintenance scheduling in flow line systems. Different policies are learned, analyzed and evaluated against a benchmark scheduling heuristi…
RL-MSA: a Reinforcement Learning-based Multi-line bus Scheduling Approach
School of Computer Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学计算机学院）；Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Distributed Computing and Service, Ministry of Education, China（教育部可信分布式计算与服务重点实验室）
University of Klagenfurt（克拉根福大学）；Graz University of Technology（格拉茨技术大学）
Scheduling is a fundamental task occurring in various automated systems applications, e.g., optimal schedules for machines on a job shop allow for a reduction of production costs and waste. Nevertheless, finding such schedules is often intractable and cannot be achieved by Combinatorial Optimization Problem (COP) methods within a given time limit. Recent advances of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in learning complex behavior enable new COP application possibilities. This paper presents an efficient DRL environment for Job-Shop Scheduling -- an important problem in the field. Furthermore, we…
This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning algorithm for generation bidding decisions and unit maintenance scheduling in a competitive electricity market environment. In this problem, each unit aims to find a bidding strategy that maximizes its revenue while concurrently retaining its reliability by scheduling preventive maintenance. The maintenance scheduling provides some safety constraints which should be satisfied at all times. Satisfying the critical safety and reliability constraints while the generation units have an incomplete information of each others' bidding strategy is a ch…
Cyber-physical systems, such as mobile robots, must respond adaptively to dynamic operating conditions. Effective operation of these systems requires that sensing and actuation tasks are performed in a timely manner. Additionally, execution of mission specific tasks such as imaging a room must be balanced against the need to perform more general tasks such as obstacle avoidance. This problem has been addressed by maintaining relative utilization of shared resources among tasks near a user-specified target level. Producing optimal scheduling strategies requires complete prior knowledge of task …
We consider the problem of scheduling in constrained queueing networks with a view to minimizing packet delay. Modern communication systems are becoming increasingly complex, and are required to handle multiple types of traffic with widely varying characteristics such as arrival rates and service times. This, coupled with the need for rapid network deployment, render a bottom up approach of first characterizing the traffic and then devising an appropriate scheduling protocol infeasible. In contrast, we formulate a top down approach to scheduling where, given an unknown network and a set of sch…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Institute of Marine Science and Technology, Shandong University（山东大学海洋科学与技术研究院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局制造技术研究院）
Priority dispatching rule (PDR) is widely used for solving real-world Job-shop scheduling problem (JSSP). However, the design of effective PDRs is a tedious task, requiring a myriad of specialized knowledge and often delivering limited performance. In this paper, we propose to automatically learn PDRs via an end-to-end deep reinforcement learning agent. We exploit the disjunctive graph representation of JSSP, and propose a Graph Neural Network based scheme to embed the states encountered during solving. The resulting policy network is size-agnostic, effectively enabling generalization on large…
University of Klagenfurt（克拉根福大学）；Graz University of Technology（格拉茨技术大学）；Infineon Technologies（英飞凌科技）
Semiconductor manufacturing is a notoriously complex and costly multi-step process involving a long sequence of operations on expensive and quantity-limited equipment. Recent chip shortages and their impacts have highlighted the importance of semiconductors in the global supply chains and how reliant on those our daily lives are. Due to the investment cost, environmental impact, and time scale needed to build new factories, it is difficult to ramp up production when demand spikes. This work introduces a method to successfully learn to schedule a semiconductor manufacturing facility more effici…
Genetic Programming with Reinforcement Learning Trained Transformer for Real-World Dynamic Scheduling Problems
Digital Port Technologies Lab, School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham Ningbo China（诺丁汉大学宁波校区计算机科学学院数字港口技术实验室）；School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学计算机科学学院）；Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学工程学院）；School of Engineering, Westlake University（西湖大学工程学院）
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；State Grid Corporation of China（国家电网有限公司）；National Power Dispatching and Control Center（国家电力调度控制中心）；China Electric Power Research Institute（中国电力科学研究院）
The growing renewable energy sources have posed significant challenges to traditional power scheduling. It is difficult for operators to obtain accurate day-ahead forecasts of renewable generation, thereby requiring the future scheduling system to make real-time scheduling decisions aligning with ultra-short-term forecasts. Restricted by the computation speed, traditional optimization-based methods can not solve this problem. Recent developments in reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated the potential to solve this challenge. However, the existing RL methods are inadequate in terms of co…
Recent years have seen a rise in interest in terms of using machine learning, particularly reinforcement learning (RL), for production scheduling problems of varying degrees of complexity. The general approach is to break down the scheduling problem into a Markov Decision Process (MDP), whereupon a simulation implementing the MDP is used to train an RL agent. Since existing studies rely on (sometimes) complex simulations for which the code is unavailable, the experiments presented are hard, or, in the case of stochastic environments, impossible to reproduce accurately. Furthermore, there is a …
For complex combinatorial optimization problems, models and algorithms are at the heart of the solution. The complexity of many types of satellite mission planning problems is NP-hard and places high demands on the solution. In this paper, two types of satellite scheduling problem models are introduced and a reinforcement learning based evolutionary algorithm framework based is proposed.
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Central South University（中南大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院系统研究所）
There hardly exists a general solver that is efficient for scheduling problems due to their diversity and complexity. In this study, we develop a two-stage framework, in which reinforcement learning (RL) and traditional operations research (OR) algorithms are combined together to efficiently deal with complex scheduling problems. The scheduling problem is solved in two stages, including a finite Markov decision process (MDP) and a mixed-integer programming process, respectively. This offers a novel and general paradigm that combines RL with OR approaches to solving scheduling problems, which l…
In this extended abstract, we propose a new technique for query scheduling with the explicit goal of reducing disk reads and thus implicitly increasing query performance. We introduce SmartQueue, a learned scheduler that leverages overlapping data reads among incoming queries and learns a scheduling strategy that improves cache hits. SmartQueue relies on deep reinforcement learning to produce workload-specific scheduling strategies that focus on long-term performance benefits while being adaptive to previously-unseen data access patterns. We present results from a proof-of-concept prototype, d…
We propose ScheduleNet, a RL-based real-time scheduler, that can solve various types of multi-agent scheduling problems. We formulate these problems as a semi-MDP with episodic reward (makespan) and learn ScheduleNet, a decentralized decision-making policy that can effectively coordinate multiple agents to complete tasks. The decision making procedure of ScheduleNet includes: (1) representing the state of a scheduling problem with the agent-task graph, (2) extracting node embeddings for agent and tasks nodes, the important relational information among agents and tasks, by employing the type-aw…
Research Center of Smart Networks and Systems, Fudan University（复旦大学智慧网络与系统研究中心）；School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, Cornell University（康奈尔大学运筹学与信息工程学院）
Minimizing job scheduling time is a fundamental issue in data center networks that has been extensively studied in recent years. The incoming jobs require different CPU and memory units, and span different number of time slots. The traditional solution is to design efficient heuristic algorithms with performance guarantee under certain assumptions. In this paper, we improve a recently proposed job scheduling algorithm using deep reinforcement learning and extend it to multiple server clusters. Our study reveals that deep reinforcement learning method has the potential to outperform traditional…
Hangzhou Research Center, Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司杭州研究中心）；Ottawa Research Center, Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司渥太华研究中心）
To improve the system performance towards the Shannon limit, advanced radio resource management mechanisms play a fundamental role. In particular, scheduling should receive much attention, because it allocates radio resources among different users in terms of their channel conditions and QoS requirements. The difficulties of scheduling algorithms are the tradeoffs need to be made among multiple objectives, such as throughput, fairness and packet drop rate. We propose a smart scheduling scheme based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL). We not only verify the performance gain achieved, but also…
