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A Universal Approach to Feature Representation in Dynamic Task Assignment Problems

Created by
  • Haebom

Author

Riccardo Lo Bianco, Remco Dijkman, Wim Nuijten, Willem van Jaarsveld

Outline

This paper addresses the dynamic task allocation problem of optimally allocating resources to tasks in business processes. Although deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has recently been proposed as a state-of-the-art method to solve this problem, it is still a difficult task to represent states and possible assignments as inputs and outputs of a policy neural network (NN) when tasks or resources have features that can have infinite values. This paper presents a method to represent and solve the assignment problem with infinite state and action spaces, and provides three contributions: a graph-based feature representation called an assignment graph, a mapping from labeled colored Petri nets to the assignment graph, and an application of a proximate policy optimization algorithm that can learn to solve the assignment problem represented through the assignment graph. We evaluate the proposed method by modeling three typical assignment problems with near-infinite state and action space dimensions, and show that it is suitable for representing and learning near-optimal task allocation policies regardless of the state and action space dimensions.

Takeaways, Limitations

Takeaways:
We present an efficient solution to the dynamic task assignment problem with infinite state and action space.
Efficient modeling of complex allocation problems through a novel graph-based representation called allocation graph.
Expanding the possibilities of modeling diverse systems through mapping with color Petri nets.
Verification of the efficiency of learning using the proximal policy optimization algorithm.
Limitations:
Additional experiments and verification are needed to apply the proposed method to real business environments.
Further research is needed on generalizability to different types of tasks and resource characteristics.
Potential increase in computational cost as the complexity of the allocation graph increases.
Limitations of mapping methods that may only be applicable to certain types of Petri nets.
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