In the modern supply chain system, large-scale transportation tasks require the collaborative work of multiple vehicles to be completed on time. Over the past few decades, multi-vehicle route planning was mainly implemented by heuristic algorithms. However, these algorithms face the dilemma of long computation time. In recent years, some machine learning-based methods are also proposed for vehicle route planning, but the existing algorithms can hardly solve multi-vehicle time-sensitive problems. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning model, which optimizes the route length and the vehicle’s arrival time simultaneously. The model is based on the encoder-decoder framework. The encoder mines the relationship between the customer nodes in the problem, and the decoder generates the route of each vehicle iteratively. Specially, we design multiple route recorders to extract the route history information of vehicles and realize the communication between them. In the inferring phase, the model could immediately generate routes for all vehicles in a new instance. To further improve the performance of the model, we devise a multi-sampling strategy and obtain the balance boundary between computation time and performance improvement. In addition, we propose a simulation-based vehicle configuration method to select the optimal number of vehicles in real applications. For validation, we conduct a series of experiments on problems with different customer amounts and various vehicle numbers. The results show that the proposed model outperforms other typical algorithms in both performance and calculation time.
11 March 2022 in International Journal of Production Research
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) provides a foundation for the development of emerging digital servitization paradigm in smart manufacturing. The deep integration of massive heterogeneous IIOT data plays a critical role in realising manufacturing digital servitization. However, there is a knowledge gap between different manufacturing fields, which brings a challenge for efficient integration and leverage of industrial big data. For this purpose, a Framework of Manufacturing Knowledge Graph (FMKG) is proposed, which is used to extracts industry knowledge triples from multi-source heterogeneous data to integrate domain knowledge. Also, an attention-based graph embedding model (ABGE) is proposed to discover and complement the implicit missing relationships in the knowledge graph to obtain a complete industrial knowledge graph. The effectiveness of the ABGE model has been verified on several knowledge graph data sets. And an aerospace enterprise production process was taken as an example to establish a product quality knowledge graph, which proved the feasibility of the proposed method.
1 August 2019 in Future Generation Computer Systems