A Data-Driven Column Generation Algorithm For Bin Packing Problem in Manufacturing Industry

The bin packing problem exists widely in real logistic scenarios (e.g., packing pipeline, express delivery), with its goal to improve the packing efficiency and reduce the transportation cost. In this NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, the position and quantity of each item in the box are strictly restricted by complex constraints and special customer requirements. Existing approaches are hard to obtain the optimal solution since rigorous constraints cannot be handled within a reasonable computation load. In this paper, for handling this difficulty, the packing knowledge is extracted from historical data collected from the packing pipeline of Huawei. First, by fully exploiting the relationship between historical packing records and input orders(orders to be packed) , the problem is reformulated as a set cover problem. Then, two novel strategies, the constraint handling and process acceleration strategies are applied to the classic column generation approach to solve this set cover problem. The cost of solving pricing problem for generating new columns is high due to the complex constraints and customer requirements. The proposed constraints handling strategy exploits the historical packing records with the most negative value of the reduced cost. Those constraints have been implicitly satisfied in these historical packing records so that there is no need to conduct further evaluation on constraints, thus the computational load is saved. To further eliminate the iteration process of column generation algorithm and accelerate the optimization process, a Learning to Price approach called Modified Pointer Network is proposed, by which we can determine which historical packing records should be selected directly. Through experiments on realworld datasets, we show our proposed method can improve the packing success rate and decrease the computation time simultaneously.

Rethink AI-based Power Grid Control: Diving Into Algorithm Design

Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach has shown promisein solving complex decision and control problems in power engineering domain.In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of DRL-based voltage control fromaspects of algorithm selection, state space representation, and reward engineering.To resolve observed issues, we propose a novel imitation learning-based approachto directly map power grid operating points to effective actions without any interimreinforcement learning process. The performance results demonstrate that theproposed approach has strong generalization ability with much less training time.The agent trained by imitation learning is effective and robust to solve voltagecontrol problem and outperforms the former RL agents.