A Rapid Search Method for Scheduling Delivery of Multiple Automated Guided Vehicles

In this study, a method was developed to address the automated guided vehicle (AGV) transportation scheduling problem. For deliveries in factories and warehouses, it is necessary to quickly plan a feasible transportation schedule without delay within a specified time. This study focused on obtaining a transport schedule without delay from the specified time while maintaining the search for a better solution during the execution of the transport task. Accordingly, a method was developed for constructing a solution with a two-dimensional array of delivery tasks for each AGV, arranged in the order in which they are executed, as well as for searching for a schedule by performing exchange and insertion operations. For the exchange and insertion, a method that considers the connectivity between the end point of a task and the start point of the next task was adopted. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, numerical simulations were performed assuming an actual transportation task.

Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Workload Scheduling for Edge Computing

Edge computing is a new paradigm for providing cloud computing capacities at the edge of network near mobile users. It offers an effective solution to help mobile devices with computation-intensive and delay-sensitive tasks. However, the edge of network presents a dynamic environment with large number of devices, high mobility of users, heterogeneous applications and intermittent traffic. In such environment, edge computing often suffers from unbalance resource allocation, which leads to task failure and affects system performance. To tackle this problem, we proposed a deep reinforcement learning(DRL)-based workload scheduling approach with the goal of balancing the workload, reducing the service time and the failed task rate. Meanwhile, We adopt Deep-Q-Network(DQN) algorithms to solve the complexity and high dimension of workload scheduling problem. Simulation results show that our proposed approach achieves the best performance in aspects of service time, virtual machine(VM) utilization, and failed tasks rate compared with other approaches. Our DRL-based approach can provide an efficient solution to the workload scheduling problem in edge computing.