Fast Approximations for Job Shop Scheduling: A Lagrangian Dual Deep Learning Method

James Kotary, Ferdinando Fioretto, Pascal Van Hentenryck

[AAAI-22] Main Track
Abstract: The Jobs Shop Scheduling problem (JSP) is a canonical combinatorial optimization problem that is routinely solved for a variety of industrial purposes. It models the optimal scheduling of multiple sequences of tasks, each under a fixed order of operations, in which individual tasks require exclusive access to a predetermined resource for a specified processing time. The problem is NP-hard and computationally challenging even for medium-sized instances. Motivated by the increased stochasticity in production chains, this paper explores a deep learning approach to deliver efficient and accurate approximations to the JSP. In particular, this paper proposes the design of a deep neural network architecture to exploit the problem structure, its integration with Lagrangian duality to capture the problem constraints, and a post-processing optimization, to guarantee solution feasibility. The resulting method, called JSP-DNN, is evaluated on hard JSP instances from the JSPLIB benchmark library and is shown to produce JSP approximations of high quality at negligible computational costs.

Introduction Video

Sessions where this paper appears

  • Poster Session 6

    Blue 4

  • Poster Session 10

    Blue 4