The Dynamic Pickup and Delivery Problem (DPDP) is aimed at dynamically scheduling vehicles among multiple sites in order to minimize the cost when delivery orders are not known a priori. Although DPDP plays an important role in modern logistics and supply chain management, state-of-the-art DPDP algorithms are still limited on their solution quality and efficiency. In practice, they fail to provide a scalable solution as the numbers of vehicles and sites become large. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach, Spatial-Temporal Aided Double Deep Graph Network (ST-DDGN), to solve industry-scale DPDP. In our method, the delivery demands are first forecast using spatial-temporal prediction method, which guides the neural network to perceive spatial-temporal distribution of delivery demand when dispatching vehicles. Besides, the relationships of individuals such as vehicles are modelled by establishing a graph-based value function. ST-DDGN incorporates attentionbased graph embedding with Double DQN (DDQN). As such, it can make the inference across vehicles more efficiently compared with traditional methods. Our method is entirely data driven and thus adaptive, i.e., the relational representation of adjacent vehicles can be learned and corrected by ST-DDGN from data periodically. We have conducted extensive experiments over realworld data to evaluate our solution. The results show that ST-DDGN reduces 11.27% number of the used vehicles and decreases 13.12% total transportation cost on average over the strong baselines, including the heuristic algorithm deployed in our UAT (User Acceptance Test) environment and a variety of vanilla DRL methods. We are due to fully deploy our solution into our online logistics system and it is estimated that millions of USD logistics cost can be saved per year.
Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) scheduling in a heterogeneous environment is aimed at assigning the on-the-fly jobs to a cluster of heterogeneous computing executors in order to minimize the makespan while meeting all requirements of scheduling. The problem gets more attention than ever since the rapid development of heterogeneous cloud computing. A little reduction of makespan of DAG scheduling could both bring huge profits to the service providers and increase the level of service of users. Although DAG scheduling plays an important role in cloud computing industries, existing solutions still have huge room for improvement, especially in making use of topological dependencies between jobs. In this paper, we propose a task-duplication based learning algorithm, called Lachesis, for the distributed DAG scheduling problem. In our approach, it first perceives the topological dependencies between jobs using a specially designed graph convolutional network (GCN) to select the most likely task to be executed. Then the task is assigned to a specific executor with the consideration of duplicating all its precedent tasks according to a sophisticated heuristic method. We have conducted extensive experiments over standard workload data to evaluate our solution. The experimental results suggest that the proposed algorithm can achieve at most 26.7% reduction of makespan and 35.2% improvement of speedup ratio over seven strong baseline algorithms, including state-of-the-art heuristics methods and a variety of deep reinforcement learning based algorithms.
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