Apprenticeship Learning: Learning to Schedule from Human Experts

Abstract

Coordinating agents to complete a set of tasks with intercoupled emporal and resource constraints is computationally challenging, yet human domain experts can solve these difficult scheduling problems using paradigms learned through years of apprenticeship. A process for manually codifying this domain knowledge within a computational framework is necessary to scale beyond the one-expert, one-trainee apprenticeship model. However, a human domain expert often has difficulty describing their decision-making process, causing the codification of this knowledge to become laborious. We propose a new approach for capturing domain expert heuristics through a pairwise ranking formulation. Our approach is model-free and does not require enumerating or iterating through a large state-space. We empirically demonstrate that this approach accurately learns multi-faceted heuristics on both a synthetic data set incorporating job-shop scheduling and vehicle routing problems and a real-world data set consisting of demonstrations of experts solving a variant of the weapon-to-target assignment problem. Our approach is able to learn scheduling policies of superior quality to those generated, on average, by human experts conducting an anti-ship missile defense task.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 09, 2016
Accession Number
AD1033906

Entities

People

  • Jessica Stigile
  • Julie Shah
  • Matthew C. Gombolay
  • Reed E. Jensen
  • Sung-hyun Son

Organizations

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Anti-Ship Missiles
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Artificial Intelligence Software
  • Computational Science
  • Data Mining
  • Data Sets
  • Dynamic Programming
  • Health Care
  • Information Retrieval
  • Information Science
  • Machine Learning
  • Operations Research
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Scheduling (Production)
  • Supervised Machine Learning
  • Training

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Operations Research

Technology Areas

  • Space