Scalable Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Factory-wide Dynamic Scheduling

Content

We are pleased to invite you to the upcoming MIE Seminar Series, featuring Dr. Diego Klabjan, Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Northwestern University.

Abstract: Real-time dynamic scheduling is a crucial but notoriously challenging task in modern manufacturing processes due to its high decision complexity. We propose and apply a leader-follower multi-agent RL (MARL) concept to obtain desired coordination after decomposing the scheduling problem into a set of sub-problems that are handled by each individual agent for scalability. The newly proposed algorithm and framework are shown to be scientifically grounded. We further strengthen the procedure by proposing a rule-based conversion algorithm to prevent catastrophic loss of production capacity due to an agent’s error. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art deep RL-based scheduling models in various aspects. 

Bio: Diego Klabjan is a professor at Northwestern University, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences. He is also acting and Founding Director, Master of Science in Machine Learning and Data Science, and Director, Center for Deep Learning. After obtaining his doctorate from the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering of the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1999 in Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization, in the same year he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2007 he became an associate professor at Northwestern and in 2012 he was promoted to a full professor. His research is focused on machine learning, genAI, statistical learning, and deep learning as they relate to modeling, methodologies, and theoretical results. Professor Klabjan has led projects with large companies such as Intel, Baxter, Allstate, AbbVie, FedEx Express, General Motors, United Continental, and many others, and he is also assisting numerous start-ups with their analytics needs. He was also a co-founder of Videspan, LLC which has been acquired by Coupa.

Host: Dr. Mengfan Xu

We hope you can join us for this exciting seminar! A pizza lunch will be provided, and there will be an opportunity for questions and discussion following the presentation.