In the context of intelligent manufacturing, the integrated scheduling problem of dual rail-guided vehicles (RGVs) and multiple parallel processing equipment in flexible manufacturing systems has gained increasing importance. This problem exhibits spatiotemporal coupling and dynamic constraint characteristics, making traditional optimization methods ineffective at finding optimal solutions. At the problem formulation level, the dual resource scheduling task is modeled as a mixed-integer optimization problem. An intelligent scheduling framework based on action mask-constrained Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) deep reinforcement learning is proposed to achieve integrated decision-making for production equipment allocation and RGV path planning. The approach models the scheduling problem as a Markov Decision Process, designing a high-dimensional state space, along with a multi-discrete action space that integrates machine selection and RGV motion control. The framework employs a shared feature extraction layer and dual-head Actor-Critic network architecture, combined with parallel experience collection and synchronous parameter update mechanisms. In computational experiments across different scales, the proposed method achieves an average makespan reduction of 15–20% compared with numerical methods, while exhibiting excellent robustness under uncertain conditions including processing time fluctuations.
Nengqi Zhang (Fri,) studied this question.