24,215 research outputs found
Multi-Agent Coverage Control with Energy Depletion and Repletion
We develop a hybrid system model to describe the behavior of multiple agents
cooperatively solving an optimal coverage problem under energy depletion and
repletion constraints. The model captures the controlled switching of agents
between coverage (when energy is depleted) and battery charging (when energy is
replenished) modes. It guarantees the feasibility of the coverage problem by
defining a guard function on each agent's battery level to prevent it from
dying on its way to a charging station. The charging station plays the role of
a centralized scheduler to solve the contention problem of agents competing for
the only charging resource in the mission space. The optimal coverage problem
is transformed into a parametric optimization problem to determine an optimal
recharging policy. This problem is solved through the use of Infinitesimal
Perturbation Analysis (IPA), with simulation results showing that a full
recharging policy is optimal
Human-Machine Collaborative Optimization via Apprenticeship Scheduling
Coordinating agents to complete a set of tasks with intercoupled temporal and
resource constraints is computationally challenging, yet human domain experts
can solve these difficult scheduling problems using paradigms learned through
years of apprenticeship. A process for manually codifying this domain knowledge
within a computational framework is necessary to scale beyond the
``single-expert, single-trainee" apprenticeship model. However, human domain
experts often have difficulty describing their decision-making processes,
causing the codification of this knowledge to become laborious. We propose a
new approach for capturing domain-expert heuristics through a pairwise ranking
formulation. Our approach is model-free and does not require enumerating or
iterating through a large state space. We empirically demonstrate that this
approach accurately learns multifaceted heuristics on a synthetic data set
incorporating job-shop scheduling and vehicle routing problems, as well as on
two real-world data sets consisting of demonstrations of experts solving a
weapon-to-target assignment problem and a hospital resource allocation problem.
We also demonstrate that policies learned from human scheduling demonstration
via apprenticeship learning can substantially improve the efficiency of a
branch-and-bound search for an optimal schedule. We employ this human-machine
collaborative optimization technique on a variant of the weapon-to-target
assignment problem. We demonstrate that this technique generates solutions
substantially superior to those produced by human domain experts at a rate up
to 9.5 times faster than an optimization approach and can be applied to
optimally solve problems twice as complex as those solved by a human
demonstrator.Comment: Portions of this paper were published in the Proceedings of the
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 2016 and
in the Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in 2016. The paper
consists of 50 pages with 11 figures and 4 table
A WOA-based optimization approach for task scheduling in cloud Computing systems
Task scheduling in cloud computing can directly
affect the resource usage and operational cost of a system. To
improve the efficiency of task executions in a cloud, various
metaheuristic algorithms, as well as their variations, have been
proposed to optimize the scheduling. In this work, for the
first time, we apply the latest metaheuristics WOA (the whale
optimization algorithm) for cloud task scheduling with a multiobjective optimization model, aiming at improving the performance of a cloud system with given computing resources. On that
basis, we propose an advanced approach called IWC (Improved
WOA for Cloud task scheduling) to further improve the optimal
solution search capability of the WOA-based method. We present
the detailed implementation of IWC and our simulation-based
experiments show that the proposed IWC has better convergence
speed and accuracy in searching for the optimal task scheduling
plans, compared to the current metaheuristic algorithms. Moreover, it can also achieve better performance on system resource
utilization, in the presence of both small and large-scale tasks
AI and OR in management of operations: history and trends
The last decade has seen a considerable growth in the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for operations management with the aim of finding solutions to problems that are increasing in complexity and scale. This paper begins by setting the context for the survey through a historical perspective of OR and AI. An extensive survey of applications of AI techniques for operations management, covering a total of over 1200 papers published from 1995 to 2004 is then presented. The survey utilizes Elsevier's ScienceDirect database as a source. Hence, the survey may not cover all the relevant journals but includes a sufficiently wide range of publications to make it representative of the research in the field. The papers are categorized into four areas of operations management: (a) design, (b) scheduling, (c) process planning and control and (d) quality, maintenance and fault diagnosis. Each of the four areas is categorized in terms of the AI techniques used: genetic algorithms, case-based reasoning, knowledge-based systems, fuzzy logic and hybrid techniques. The trends over the last decade are identified, discussed with respect to expected trends and directions for future work suggested
Learning Scheduling Algorithms for Data Processing Clusters
Efficiently scheduling data processing jobs on distributed compute clusters
requires complex algorithms. Current systems, however, use simple generalized
heuristics and ignore workload characteristics, since developing and tuning a
scheduling policy for each workload is infeasible. In this paper, we show that
modern machine learning techniques can generate highly-efficient policies
automatically. Decima uses reinforcement learning (RL) and neural networks to
learn workload-specific scheduling algorithms without any human instruction
beyond a high-level objective such as minimizing average job completion time.
Off-the-shelf RL techniques, however, cannot handle the complexity and scale of
the scheduling problem. To build Decima, we had to develop new representations
for jobs' dependency graphs, design scalable RL models, and invent RL training
methods for dealing with continuous stochastic job arrivals. Our prototype
integration with Spark on a 25-node cluster shows that Decima improves the
average job completion time over hand-tuned scheduling heuristics by at least
21%, achieving up to 2x improvement during periods of high cluster load
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