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Interpretable online scheduling for chemical batch plants with attention augmented reinforcement learning agents

2025· article· en· W4415488523 on OpenAlexafffund
Daniel Rangel-Martínez, Luis Ricardez‐Sandoval

Bibliographic record

VenueComputers & Chemical Engineering · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicAdvanced Control Systems Optimization
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaConsejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología
KeywordsInterpretabilityReinforcement learningScheduling (production processes)Relevance (law)Artificial neural networkKey (lock)Job shop schedulingInterpretation (philosophy)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

A method for training Deep Reinforcement Learning agents with self-attention modules is presented to address online scheduling decisions in batch chemical plants. The agent is designed to generate multiple decisions at the same time in a partially observable environment; these decisions can be either discrete or continuous. The use of self-attention modules is justified by their increasing popularity in Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods over Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). This method leverages the attention-based models by using the attention matrices generated by the agent to produce a numeric interpretation of the agent’s logic. Additionally, a second attention matrix with fixed parameters was embedded in the architecture to define the relevance of each part of the environment. The information from these matrices is demonstrated to be useful for interpreting the relevance of key aspects in the environment and to track the change of the agent’s focal points in non-stationary environments. The methodology is tested in two batch chemical plant case studies, demonstrating the advantages and limitations in comparison to an agent built with RNNs. The interpretability of the decisions and the logic of the agent showed an option to approach the so called black-box characteristic of data-driven models.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: Simulation or modeling
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.778
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.005
GPT teacher head0.207
Teacher spread0.202 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designSimulation or modeling
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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