Introducing PetriRL: An innovative framework for JSSP resolution integrating Petri nets and event-based reinforcement learning

Resource utilization and production process optimization are crucial for companies in today’s competitive industrial landscape. Addressing the complexities of job shop scheduling problems (JSSP) is essential to improving productivity, reducing costs, and ensuring timely delivery. We propose PetriRL, a novel framework integrating Petri nets and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for JSSP optimization. PetriRL capitalizes on the inherent strengths of Petri nets in modelling discrete event systems while leveraging the advantages of a graph structure. The Petri net governs automated components of the process, ensuring adherence to JSSP constraints. This allows for synergistic collaboration with optimization algorithms such as DRL, particularly in critical decision-making. Unlike traditional methods, PetriRL eliminates the need to preprocess JSSP instances into disjunctive graphs and enhances the explainability of process status through its graphical structure based on places and transitions. Additionally, the inherent graph structure of Petri nets enables the dynamic additions of job operations during the inference phase without requiring agent retraining, thus enhancing flexibility. Experimental results demonstrate PetriRL’s robust generalization across various instance sizes and its competitive performance on public test benchmarks and randomly generated instances. Results are compared to a wide range of optimization solutions such as heuristics, metaheuristics, and learning-based algorithms. Finally, the added values of the framework’s key elements, such as event-based control and action masking, are studied in the ablation study.