Curriculum Learning with GNN-based Reinforcement Learning for Job Shop Scheduling

2026-09-23

AI Summary

本文针对作业车间调度问题，采用基于图神经网络的强化学习，并结合课程学习方法，通过先在小规模实例上训练再逐步适应更大规模，以提高算法效率和泛化能力。

Abstract

The job shop scheduling problem is a challenging combinatorial optimization problem, and recent reinforcement learning approaches using graph neural networks have shown promise for learning scheduling policies directly from problem instances. However, training on large instances remains computationally expensive, and generalization across instance sizes remains challenging. This paper studies curriculum learning for graph neural network-based reinforcement learning in the job shop scheduling problem by comparing it with single-size training across three target sizes: 20 x 20, 25 x 25, and 30 x 30. In the curriculum setting, the policy is first trained on smaller instances and then progressively adapted to larger target sizes, allowing scheduling behavior learned in earlier stages to support learning on larger instances. Models are evaluated on unseen instances from 8 x 8 to 30 x 30 using the optimality gap, considering both generalization across all evaluation sizes and specialization on the target size. Results show that curriculum learning consistently reduces wall-clock training time, with larger benefits as the target size increases. The strongest advantage is observed at 30 x 30, where curriculum learning reduces the mean optimality gap across all evaluation sizes by approximately 8.1 percentage points, reduces the target-size mean optimality gap by approximately 8.6 percentage points, and saves approximately 50 hours of training time.

Problem

• job shop scheduling
• graph neural networks
• reinforcement learning
• curriculum learning
• computational cost

Innovation

• Curriculum Learning
• Graph Neural Networks
• Reinforcement Learning
• Job Shop Scheduling