The Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) is a fundamental combinatorial optimization problem in industrial optimization. This work introduces Pretrained Offline Reinforcement Learning (PORL), a hybrid approach that combines simulation-based online pretraining with offline fine-tuning on production-specific data. Reinforcement learning through online interaction enables exploration of general scheduling strategies, but typically relies on simulation environments and may suffer from a simulation-to-reality gap. In contrast, offline RL avoids direct interaction with the environment by learning from historical data, but its performance is strongly influenced by dataset quality and coverage. PORL combines the strengths of both paradigms by first learning a general scheduling policy through online interaction and subsequently adapting it offline to a target distribution. A KL-divergence-based policy constraint is introduced to limit deviations from the pretrained policy during fine-tuning. The approach is evaluated on JSSP instances with distribution shift and datasets generated from heuristic, noisy-expert, and random behavioral policies. The results show that PORL consistently achieves lower optimality gaps than standalone offline RL and the considered general scheduling baselines. Furthermore, its advantage over standalone offline RL increases as dataset quality decreases, indicating reduced sensitivity to the quality and coverage of the available offline data. The results suggest that offline adaptation of pretrained policies is a promising approach for industrial scheduling environments where direct online exploration is impractical.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Training pipeline of (a) the offline Reinforcement Learning baseline and (b) the proposed Pretrained Offline Reinforcement Learning approach.
Efficiently solving the Job Shop Scheduling Problem in real-world industrial applications requires policies that are both computationally lean and topologically robust. While Reinforcement Learning has shown potential in automating dispatching rules, existing models often struggle with a scalability bottleneck caused by quadratic graph complexity or the architectural overhead of heterogeneous layers. We introduce a unified graph framework that employs feature-based homogenization to project distinct node roles into a shared latent space. This allows a standard homogeneous Graph Isomorphism Network to capture complex resource contention with linear complexity, ensuring low-latency inference for large-scale industrial applications. Our empirical results demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while exhibiting consistent zero-shot generalization. We identify the job-to-machine ratio as the primary driver of policy effectiveness, rather than absolute problem size. Based on this, we propose a hypothesis of structural saturation, demonstrating that policies trained on critically congested instances (J≈M) learn scale-invariant resolution strategies. Agents trained at this saturation point internalize invariant conflict-resolution logic, allowing them to treat massive rectangular instances as a sequential concatenation of saturated sub-problems. This approach eliminates the need for expensive scale-specific retraining and prevents overfitting to statistical shortcuts, providing a robust and efficient pathway for deploying RL solutions in dynamic production environments.
Jonathan Hoss, Moritz Link, Noah Klarmann
Faculty of Management and Engineering, Rosenheim Technical University of Applied Sciences, Germany
This paper proposes a novel Variational Graph-to-Scheduler (VG2S) framework for solving the Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP), a critical task in manufacturing that directly impacts operational efficiency and resource utilization. Conventional Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approaches often face challenges such as non-stationarity during training and limited generalization to unseen problem instances because they optimize representation learning and policy execution simultaneously. To address these issues, we introduce variational inference to the JSSP domain for the first time and derive a probabilistic objective based on the Evidence of Lower Bound (ELBO) with maximum entropy reinforcement learning. By mathematically decoupling representation learning from policy optimization, the VG2S framework enables the agent to learn robust structural representations of scheduling instances through a variational graph encoder. This approach significantly enhances training stability and robustness against hyperparameter variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits superior zero-shot generalization compared with state-of-the-art DRL baselines and traditional dispatching rules, particularly on large-scale and challenging benchmark instances such as DMU and SWV.
Seung Heon Oh, Jiwon Baek, Hyunjin Oh +3
Republic of Korea Navy · Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering Seoul National University · Research Institute of Marine Systems Engineering Seoul National University
The rise of smart manufacturing under Industry 4.0 introduces mass customization and dynamic production, demanding more advanced and flexible scheduling techniques. The flexible job-shop scheduling problem (FJSP) has attracted significant attention due to its complex constraints and strong alignment with real-world production scenarios. Current deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approaches to FJSP predominantly employ constructive methods. While effective, they often fall short of reaching (near-)optimal solutions. In contrast, improvement-based methods iteratively explore the neighborhood of initial solutions and are more effective in approaching optimality. However, the flexible machine allocation in FJSP poses significant challenges to the application of this framework, including accurate state representation, effective policy learning, and efficient search strategies. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Memory-enhanced Improvement Search framework with heterogeneous graph representation--MIStar. It employs a novel heterogeneous disjunctive graph that explicitly models the operation sequences on machines to accurately represent scheduling solutions. Moreover, a memoryenhanced heterogeneous graph neural network (MHGNN) is designed for feature extraction, leveraging historical trajectories to enhance the decision-making capability of the policy network. Finally, a parallel greedy search strategy is adopted to explore the solution space, enabling superior solutions with fewer iterations. Extensive experiments on synthetic data and public benchmarks demonstrate that MIStar significantly outperforms both traditional handcrafted improvement heuristics and state-of-the-art DRL-based constructive methods.
Jiaqi Wang, Zhiguang Cao, Peng Zhao +4
Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, Jilin University · College of Software, Jilin University · Singapore Management University +2