Author:

Keywords:

Reinforcement learning, Metaheuristics, itec, iMinds, ITEC, Artificial Intelligence & Image Processing, 4007 Control engineering, mechatronics and robotics, 4602 Artificial intelligence, 4611 Machine learning

Abstract:

Many techniques that boost the speed or quality of metaheuristic search have been reported within literature. The present contribution investigates the rather rare combination of reinforcement learning and metaheuristics. Reinforcement learning techniques describe how an autonomous agent can learn from experience. Previous work has shown that a network of simple reinforcement learning devices based on learning automata can generate good heuristics for (multi) project scheduling problems. However, using reinforcement learning to generate heuristics is just one method of how reinforcement learning can strengthen metaheuristic search. Both existing and new methodologies to boost metaheuristics using reinforcement learning are presented together with experiments on actual benchmarks. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.