Dynamic Decision Making in Engineering System Design: A Deep Q-Learning Approach

Engineering system design, viewed as a decision-making process, faces challenges due to complexity and uncertainty. In this paper, we present a framework proposing the use of the Deep Q-learning algorithm to optimize the design of engineering systems. We outline a step-by-step framework for optimizing engineering system designs. The goal is to find policies that maximize the output of a simulation model given multiple sources of uncertainties. The proposed algorithm handles linear and non-linear multi-stage stochastic problems, where decision variables are discrete, and the objective function and constraints are assessed via a Monte Carlo simulation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework by solving two engineering system design problems in the presence of multiple uncertainties, such as price and demand.

GNN-GMVO: Graph Neural Networks for Optimizing Gross Merchandise Value in Similar Item Recommendation

Similar item recommendation is a critical task in the e-Commerce industry, which helps customers explore similar and relevant alternatives based on their interested products. Despite the traditional machine learning models, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), by design, can understand complex relations like similarity between products. However, in contrast to their wide usage in retrieval tasks and their focus on optimizing the relevance, the current GNN architectures are not tailored toward maximizing revenue-related objectives such as Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), which is one of the major business metrics for e-Commerce companies. In addition, defining accurate edge relations in GNNs is non-trivial in large-scale e-Commerce systems, due to the heterogeneity nature of the item-item relationships. This work aims to address these issues by designing a new GNN architecture called GNN-GMVO (Graph Neural Network - Gross Merchandise Value Optimizer). This model directly optimizes GMV while considering the complex relations between items. In addition, we propose a customized edge construction method to tailor the model toward similar item recommendation task and alleviate the noisy and complex item-item relations. In our comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets, we show higher prediction performance and expected GMV for top ranked items recommended by our model when compared with selected state-of-the-art benchmark models.