Self-Supervised Long-Short Term Memory Network for Solving Complex Job Shop Scheduling Problem

The job shop scheduling problem (JSSP) plays a critical role in smart manufacturing, an effective JSSP scheduler could save time cost and increase productivity. Conventional methods are very time-consumption and cannot deal with complicated JSSP instances as it uses one optimal algorithm to solve JSSP. This paper proposes an effective scheduler based on deep learning technology named self-supervised long-short term memory (SS-LSTM) to handle complex JSSP accurately. First, using the optimal method to generate sufficient training samples in small-scale JSSP. SS-LSTM is then applied to extract rich feature representations from generated training samples and decide the next action. In the proposed SS-LSTM, two channels are employed to reflect the full production statues. Specifically, the detailed-level channel records 18 detailed product information while the system-level channel reflects the type of whole system states identified by the k-means algorithm. Moreover, adopting a self-supervised mechanism with LSTM autoencoder to keep high feature extraction capacity simultaneously ensuring the reliable feature representative ability. The authors implemented, trained, and compared the proposed method with the other leading learning-based methods on some complicated JSSP instances. The experimental results have confirmed the effectiveness and priority of the proposed method for solving complex JSSP instances in terms of make-span.