Reinforcement Learning for Segmented Manufacturing

The manufacturing of large components is, in comparison to small components, cost intensive. This is due to the sheer size of the components and the limited scalability in number of produced items. To take advantage of the effects of small component production we segment the large components into smaller parts and schedule the production of these parts on regular-sized machine tools. We propose to apply and adapt recent developments in reinforcement learning in combination with heuristics to efficiently solve the resulting segmentation and assignment problem. In particular, we solve the assignment problem up to a factor of 8 faster and only a few percentages less accurate than a classic solver from operations research.