The Integrated Process Planning and Scheduling (IPPS) problem combines process route planning and shop scheduling to achieve high efficiency in manufacturing and maximize resource utilization, which is crucial for modern manufacturing systems. Traditional methods using Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) and heuristic algorithms can not well balance solution quality and speed when solving IPPS. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) method. We model the IPPS problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and employ a Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (GNN) to capture the complex relationships among operations, machines, and jobs. To optimize the scheduling strategy, we use Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). Experimental results show that, compared to traditional methods, our approach significantly improves solution efficiency and quality in large-scale IPPS instances, providing superior scheduling strategies for modern intelligent manufacturing systems.

We consider the problem of finding an informative path through a graph, given initial and terminal nodes and a given maximum path length. We assume that a linear noise corrupted measurement is taken at each node of an underlying unknown vector that we wish to estimate. The informativeness is measured by the reduction in uncertainty in our estimate, evaluated using several metrics. We present a convex relaxation for this informative path planning problem, which we can readily solve to obtain a bound on the possible performance. We develop an approximate sequential method where the path is constructed segment by segment through dynamic programming. This involves solving an orienteering problem, with the node reward acting as a surrogate for informativeness, taking the first step, and then repeating the process. The method scales to very large problem instances and achieves performance not too far from the bound produced by the convex relaxation. We also demonstrate our method's ability to handle adaptive objectives, multimodal sensing, and multi-agent variations of the informative path planning problem.

Motivated by the above limitations of prior IPP approaches, Environmental monitoring problems require estimating the we present a method that can efficiently generate current state of phenomena, such as temperature, precipitation, both discrete and continuous sensing paths, accommodate ozone concentration, soil chemistry, ocean salinity, constraints such as a distance budget and velocity limits, and fugitive gas density ([1], [2], [3], [4]). These problems handle point sensors and non-point FoV sensors, and handle are closely related to the informative path planning (IPP) both single and multi-robot IPP problems. Our approach problem ([1], [5]) since it is often the case that we have leverages gradient descent optimizable sparse Gaussian processes limited resources and, therefore, must strategically determine to solve the IPP problem, making it significantly the regions from which to collect data and the order in which faster compared to prior approaches and scalable to large to visit the regions to efficiently and accurately estimate the IPP problems.