BOLT: Multi-Bottleneck Bound-Guided Learning for Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling with Time Lags and Resource-Coupled Transport

Prefabricated prefinished volumetric construction moves most building work into module factories, whose production floor operates as a flexible job shop. A major complication is decisive: long post-operation time-lags caused by concrete curing, watertightness ponding tests, and paint drying, during which a module is blocked while its workstation stays free. On benchmark instances grounded in an official national prefabrication guidebook, these lags inflate even the optimal reference makespan by about 67% on average, and ignoring them at decision time, then repairing to feasibility, is worse than every dispatching rule. We adapt a state-of-the-art dual-attention deep reinforcement learning solver through three minimally invasive, individually ablatable extensions: lag-aware dynamics with an admissible reward bound, two anticipatory lag feature channels, and liveness-masked operation- and station-type embeddings. With every extension disabled the implementation reproduces the original solver exactly, so all gains are attributable to the adaptations. We release a public, guidebook-grounded benchmark generator. On held-out instances the learned policy is the strongest solver-free scheduler: it reaches within about 4% of a constraint-programming reference and beats every dispatching rule and a genetic-algorithm metaheuristic, with its advantage widening under capacity contention, and a single size-mixed policy carries this lead across the trained range of factory sizes. It needs no solver, model, or license in the loop and re-plans within seconds of a disruption; where an exact solver can be deployed, that solver remains the quality ceiling, a boundary we map explicitly.

Efficient job-shop scheduling with transportation resources is critical for high-performance manufacturing. With the rise of "decentralized factories", multi-agent reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising approach for the combined scheduling of production and transportation tasks. Prior work has largely focused on developing novel cooperative architectures while overlooking the question of when joint training is necessary. Joint training denotes the simultaneous training of job and automatic guided vehicle scheduling agents, whereas modular training involves independently training each agent followed by post-hoc integration. In this study, we systematically investigate the conditions under which joint training is essential for optimal performance in the job-shop scheduling problem with transportation resources. Through a rigorous sensitivity analysis of resource scarcity and temporal dominance, we quantify the coordination gap -- the performance difference between these two training modalities. In our evaluation, joint training outperforms the majority of dispatching rule combinations and modular training approaches. However, the coordination gap advantage diminishes in bottleneck environments, particularly under severe transport and processing constraints. These findings indicate that modular training represents a viable alternative in environments where a single scheduling task dominates. Overall, our work provides practical guidance for selecting between training modalities based on environmental conditions, enabling decision-makers to optimize reinforcement learning-based scheduling performance.

Neural solvers for the Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling Problem (FJSP) typically refresh graph representations and update feasibility after every operation--machine decision. However, only feasibility must remain exact at every step, whereas graph encoding is substantially more expensive and can potentially be refreshed less frequently. We present CoRS, which decouples them: an interval-level graph representation is reused across multiple sequential decisions, while a stepwise feasibility state is updated after every action. This two-timescale design amortizes graph encoding without parallelizing action generation or relaxing scheduling constraints. CoRS further develops a feasibility-preserving composite-interval decoding scheme with dynamic constraint tracking and boundary state synchronization, which reduces representation refresh frequency while maintaining continuous feasible schedule construction. Furthermore, to alleviate representation staleness caused by interval-level state reuse, CoRS introduces enhanced static features as a compensation mechanism. By providing more comprehensive structural information of the scheduling problem, these features improve the model's perception of overall problem characteristics. Extensive experiments on synthetic and multiple public FJSP benchmarks demonstrate that CoRS significantly reduces inference time while maintaining competitive solution quality, achieving favorable speed-quality trade-offs under tight wall-clock budgets and low-latency scenarios.