Search

In the order picking process of the warehouse center, considering the rapid increase in the volume of orders arriving at the picking center at the time of the promotional festival, a hybrid operation mode with multiple picking tables is used to meet the picking requirements of the huge number of real-time orders. Therefore, in this paper, a hybrid picking mode is proposed, taking into account both the idle degree of picking stations and their order item centers of gravity, and a new reinforcement learning algorithm embedding mechanism (PRL) with placeholder control is designed to solve the problem of a huge number of real-time item orders arriving at the picking center system on promotional holidays and in inconsistent quantities, and numerical simulations are performed for this algorithm. The experimental results show that the PRL algorithm in hybrid picking mode can handle a huge number of orders simultaneously and improve picking efficiency effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Path planning of intelligent driving vehicles in emergencies is a hot research issue, this paper proposes a new method of the best path selection for the intelligent driving vehicles to solve this problem. Based on the prior knowledge applied reinforcement learning strategy and the searching- optimized A* algorithm, we designed a hybrid algorithm to help intelligent driving vehicles selecting the best path in the traffic network in emergencies including limited height, width, weight, accident, and traffic jam. Through simulation experiments and scene experiments, it is proved that the proposed algorithm has good stability, high efficiency, and practicability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the clinical states of the patient, dynamic treatment regime technology can provide various therapeutic methods, which is helpful for medical treatment policymaking. Reinforcement learning is an important approach for developing this technology. In order to implement the reinforcement learning algorithm efficiently, the computation of health data is usually outsourced to the untrustworthy cloud server. However, it may leak, falsify, or delete private health data. Encryption is a common method for solving this problem. But the cloud server is difficult to calculate encrypted health data. In this paper, based on Cheon et al.'s approximate homomorphic encryption scheme, we first propose secure computation protocols for implementing comparison, maximum, exponentiation, and division. Next, we design a homomorphic reciprocal of square root protocol firstly, which only needs one approximate computation. Based on the proposed secure computation protocols, we design a secure asynchronous advantage actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithm for the first time. Then, it is used to implement a secure treatment decision-making algorithm. Simulation results show that our secure computation protocols and algorithms are feasible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reinforcement learning algorithms based on policy gradient may fall into local optimal due to gradient disappearance during the update process, which in turn affects the exploration ability of the reinforcement learning agent. In order to solve the above problem, in this paper, the cross-entropy method (CEM) in evolution policy, maximum mean difference (MMD), and twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm (TD3) are combined to propose a diversity evolutionary policy deep reinforcement learning (DEPRL) algorithm. By using the maximum mean discrepancy as a measure of the distance between different policies, some of the policies in the population maximize the distance between them and the previous generation of policies while maximizing the cumulative return during the gradient update. Furthermore, combining the cumulative returns and the distance between policies as the fitness of the population encourages more diversity in the offspring policies, which in turn can reduce the risk of falling into local optimal due to the disappearance of the gradient. The results in the MuJoCo test environment show that DEPRL has achieved excellent performance on continuous control tasks; especially in the Ant-v2 environment, the return of DEPRL ultimately achieved a nearly 20% improvement compared to TD3. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been successfully applied in many fields. In MARL, the policy evaluation problem is one of crucial problems. In order to solve this problem, distributed Temporal-Difference (TD) learning algorithm is one of the most popular methods in a cooperative manner. Despite its empirical success, however, the theory of the adaptive variant of distributed TD learning still remain limited. To fill this gap, we propose an adaptive distributed temporal-difference algorithm (referred to as MS - ADTD) under Markovian sampling over time-varying networks. Furthermore, we rigorously analyze the convergence of MS - ADTD , the theoretical results show that the local estimation can converge linearly to the optimal neighborhood. Meanwhile, the theoretical results are verified by simulation experiments. • This paper proposes a distributed adaptive TD learning algorithm under Markovian sampling. • It theoretically analyzes the non-asymptotic convergence performance of the proposed algorithm. • It verifies the performance of the proposed algorithm by experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine learning research has been able to solve problems in multiple domains. Machine learning represents an open area of research for solving optimisation problems. The optimisation problems can be solved using a metaheuristic algorithm, which can find a solution in a reasonable amount of time. However, the time required to find an appropriate metaheuristic algorithm, that would have the convenient configurations to solve a set of optimisation problems properly presents a problem. The proposal described in this article contemplates an approach that automatically creates metaheuristic algorithms given a set of optimisation problems. These metaheuristic algorithms are created by modifying their logical structure via the execution of an evolutionary process. This process employs an extension of the reinforcement learning approach that considers multi-agents in their environment, and a learning agent composed of an analysis process and a process of modification of the algorithms. The approach succeeded in creating a metaheuristic algorithm that managed to solve different continuous domain optimisation problems from the experiments performed. The implications of this work are immediate because they describe a basis for the generation of metaheuristic algorithms in an online-evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, industry is undergoing an exponential increase in binary-based combinatorial problems. In this regard, metaheuristics have been a common trend in the field in order to design approaches to successfully solve them. Thus, a well-known strategy includes the employment of continuous swarm-based algorithms transformed to perform in binary environments. In this work, we propose a hybrid approach that contains discrete smartly adapted population-based strategies to efficiently tackle binary-based problems. The proposed approach employs a reinforcement learning technique, known as SARSA (State–Action–Reward–State–Action), in order to utilize knowledge based on the run time. In order to test the viability and competitiveness of our proposal, we compare discrete state-of-the-art algorithms smartly assisted by SARSA. Finally, we illustrate interesting results where the proposed hybrid outperforms other approaches, thus, providing a novel option to tackle these types of problems in industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]