Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Twin Automated Stacking Cranes Scheduling Problem

Effective dynamic scheduling of twin Automated Stacking Cranes (ASCs) is essential for improving the efficiency of automated storage yards. While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown promise in a variety of scheduling problems, the dynamic twin ASCs scheduling problem is challenging owing to its unique attributes, including the dynamic arrival of containers, sequence-dependent setup and potential ASC interference. A novel DRL method is proposed in this paper to minimize the ASC run time and traffic congestion in the yard. Considering the information interference from ineligible containers, dynamic masked self-attention (DMA) is designed to capture the location-related relationship between containers. Additionally, we propose local information complementary attention (LICA) to supplement congestion-related information for decision making. The embeddings grasped by the LICA-DMA neural architecture can effectively represent the system state. Extensive experiments show that the agent can learn high-quality scheduling policies. Compared with rule-based heuristics, the learned policies have significantly better performance with reasonable time costs. The policies also exhibit impressive generalization ability in unseen scenarios with various scales or distributions.