Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Online Single-Machine Scheduling

Online scheduling has been an attractive field of research for over three decades. Some recent developments suggest that Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques have the potential to deal with online scheduling issues effectively. Driven by an industrial application, in this paper we apply four of the most important RL techniques, namely Q-learning, Sarsa, Watkins’s Q($\lambda$), and Sarsa($\lambda$), to the online single-machine scheduling problem. Our main goal is to provide insights on how such techniques perform. The numerical results show that Watkins’s Q($\lambda$) performs best in minimizing the total tardiness of the scheduling process.