Machine Scheduling Models Based on Reinforcement Learning for Minimizing Due Date Violation and Setup Change

Abstract

Recently, manufacturers have been struggling to efficiently use production equipment as their production methods become more sophisticated and complex. Typical factors hindering the efficiency of the manufacturing process include setup cost due to job change. Especially, in the process of using expensive production equipment such as semiconductor / LCD process, efficient use of equipment is very important. Balancing the tradeoff between meeting the deadline and minimizing setup cost incurred by changes of work type is crucial planning task. In this study, we developed a scheduling model to achieve the goal of minimizing the duedate and setup costs by using reinforcement learning in parallel machines with duedate and work preparation costs. The proposed model is a Deep Q-Network (DQN) scheduling model and is a reinforcement learning-based model. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed model, we compared it against the heuristic model and DNN(deep neural network) based model. It was confirmed that our proposed DQN method causes less due date violation and setup costs than the benchmark methods.