An efficient manufacturing system is key to maintaining a healthy economy today. With the rapid development of science and technology and the progress of human society, the modern manufacturing system is becoming increasingly complex, posing new challenges to both academia and industry. Ever since the beginning of industrialisation, leaps in manufacturing technology have always accompanied technological breakthroughs from other fields, for example, mechanics, physics, and computational science. Recently, machine learning (ML) technology, one of the crucial subjects of artificial intelligence, has made remarkable progress in many areas. This study thoroughly reviews how ML, specifically deep (reinforcement) learning, motivates new ideas for addressing challenging problems in manufacturing systems. We collect the literature targeting three aspects: scheduling, packing, and routing, which correspond to three pivotal cooperative production links of today's manufacturing system, that is, production, packing, and logistics respectively. For each aspect, we first present and discuss the state-of-the-art research. Then we summarise and analyse the development trends and point out future research opportunities and challenges.
K E Y W O R D Sbin packing, combinatorial optimisation, deep reinforcement learning, job shop scheduling, manufacturing systems, vehicle routing
| INTRODUCTIONCombinatorial optimisation problems (COPs), as one important branch of mathematical optimisation, have practical applications in many fields, such as communication, transportation, manufacturing and aroused broad research in industrial engineering, computer science, and operations research. Due to the NP (non-deterministic polynomial-time) hardness, finding their optimal solutions is challenging. In specific, the discrete solution space in COPs renders the optimisation less efficient, without the guidance of gradient as in continuous optimisation. Meanwhile, the complexity of searching the (near-)optimal solution(s) among feasible solutions could exponentially increase as the problem scale grows. Classic methods, including exact algorithms and (meta-)heuristics, generally depend on massive expertise and tuning work to solve specific problems. They are Cong Zhang, Yaoxin Wu, and Yining Ma are equal contribution.
