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

An artificial bee colony algorithm for the capacitated vehicle routing problem

Session MF-03: Population-based metaheuristics for routing problems - Stream: Metaheuristics - Invited session no. 3This paper introduces an artificial bee colony heuristic for the capacitated vehicle routing problem. The artificial bee colony heuristic is a swarm-based heuristic, which mimics the foraging behavior of a honey bee swarm. The performance of the heuristic is evaluated on two sets of benchmark instances. A new scheme is also developed to improve the performance of the artificial bee colony heuristic. Computational results show that the heuristic with the new scheme produces good solutions.postprintThe 24th European Conference on Operational Research (EURO 24), Lisbon, Portual, 11-14 July 2010. In Abstract Book of EURO 24, 2010, p. 89, MF-03-