Multi-AGV Scheduling based on Hierarchical Intrinsically Rewarded Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Jiangshan Zhang, Bin Guo, Zhuo Sun, Mengyuan Li, Jiaqi Liu, Zhiwen Yu, Xiaopeng Fan

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) has been widely used in automated warehouses and flexible manufacture systems for material delivery. As a flexible robot, AGV can finish automatic transportation of raw materials in different locations. The proper AGV scheduling strategy can effectively reduce the overall delivery time. To eliminate the large scheduling overhead from the centralized methods, we propose a multi-AGV distributed scheduling scheme in this paper. In particular, we design a Hierarchical Intrinsic Reward Mechanism (HIRM) for the multi-agent reinforcement learning to improve the convergence speed and the final policy level. Based on it, we propose the HIRM Bidirectionally-Coordinated Network (HIRM-BiCNet) based multi-AGV distributed scheduling scheme, to improve the scheduling success rate. The proposed scheme avoids the dependence on the global information and explicit communication. Experiment results demonstrate that our approach achieves impressive results at increase in scheduling success rate (30.75%) and decrease in scheduling time (16 time steps) compared to existing schemes.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2022 IEEE 19th International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Smart Systems, MASS 2022
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages155-161
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781665471800
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event19th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Smart Systems, MASS 2022 - Denver, United States
Duration: 20 Oct 202222 Oct 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2022 IEEE 19th International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Smart Systems, MASS 2022

Conference

Conference19th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Smart Systems, MASS 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityDenver
Period20/10/2222/10/22

Keywords

  • AGVs
  • Distributed Scheduling
  • Intrinsic Motivation
  • Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

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