Seminar (Dept. of Management Science and Engineering)

Title: On Deep Reinforcement Learning for OR/OM Problems

Speaker: Youhua Chen (City University of Hong Kong)

Time: 10:00 (Wednesday), April 26, 2023

Venue: Room 706, Mingde Business Building

Language：Chinese/English

ABSTRACT:

Machine learning (ML) pervades a large number of academic disciplines and industries, and its impact is profound. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is an area of  ML that focuses on sequential decision-making, which takes advantage of the deep artificial neural network architectures.  In this talk I will first give a brief overview of the literature on DRL applications in operations research/management (OR/OM) problems. I then report my experience from a recent paper applying DRL to a data-driven multi-item inventory problem. Such a problem is notoriously difficult to optimize due to the curse of dimensionality, and direct use of DRL algorithm to solve it also results in poor performance. However, after incorporating an approximation into the standard DRL algorithm, the solution performance is significantly improved. The talk ends with insight sharing; in particular, views on the roles that OR/OM researchers can play, how our domain knowledge to be incorporated into DRL methods, and how to leverage DRL to solve large scale and complex OM/R problems, including combinatorial optimization problems arising from business/ management applications.