Order acceptance with reinforcement learning

Abstract

Order Acceptance (OA) is one of the main functions in a business control framework. Basically, OA involves for each order a 0/1 (i.e., reject/accept) decision. Always accepting an order when capacity is available could unable the system to accept more convenient orders in the future. Another important aspect is the aV'(tiiability of information to the decisionmaker. We use a stochastic modeling approach using Markov decision theory and learning methods from Artificial Intelligence techniques in order to deal with uncertainty and long-term decisions in Ok Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a quite new approach that already combines this idea of modeling and solution method. Here we report on RL-solutions for some OA models