Papers › Neural Combinatorial Optimization for Stochastic Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problems

Neural Combinatorial Optimization for Stochastic Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problems

18 Dec 2024arXiv:2412.14052archive 2025-07-28

Igor G. Smit, Yaoxin Wu, Pavel Troubil, Yingqian Zhang, Wim P. M. Nuijten

Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) has gained significant attention due to the potential of deep learning to efficiently solve combinatorial optimization problems. NCO has been widely applied to job shop scheduling problems (JSPs) with the current focus predominantly on deterministic problems. In this paper, we propose a novel attention-based scenario processing module (SPM) to extend NCO methods for solving stochastic JSPs. Our approach explicitly incorporates stochastic information by an attention mechanism that captures the embedding of sampled scenarios (i.e., an approximation of stochasticity). Fed with the embedding, the base neural network is intervened by the attended scenarios, which accordingly learns an effective policy under stochasticity. We also propose a training paradigm that works harmoniously with either the expected makespan or Value-at-Risk objective. Results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing learning and non-learning methods for the flexible JSP problem with stochastic processing times on a variety of instances. In addition, our approach holds significant generalizability to varied numbers of scenarios and disparate distributions.

PaperPDFCode

Code

ai-for-decision-making-tue/NCO-for-Stochastic-FJSP officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Combinatorial OptimizationJob Shop SchedulingScheduling

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AttentionBASEFocusSoftmax

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections