Online Single-Machine Scheduling via Reinforcement Learning

Online scheduling has been an attractive field of research for over three decades. Some recent developments suggest that Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques can effectively deal with online scheduling issues. Driven by an industrial application, in this paper we apply four of the most important RL techniques, namely Q-learning, Sarsa, Watkins’s Q(λ), and Sarsa(λ), to the online single-machine scheduling problem. Our main goal is to provide insights into how such techniques perform in the scheduling process. We will consider the minimization of two different and widely used objective functions: the total tardiness and the total earliness and tardiness of the jobs. The computational experiments show that Watkins’s Q(λ) performs best in minimizing the total tardiness. At the same time, it seems that the RL approaches are not very effective in minimizing the total earliness and tardiness over large time horizons.