Abstract
Automated warehouses are widely deployed in large-scale distribution centers due to their ability of reducing operational cost and improving throughput capacity. In an automated warehouse, orders are fulfilled by battery-powered AGVs transporting movable shelves or boxes. Therefore, battery management is crucial to the productivity since recovering depleted batteries can be time-consuming and seriously affect the overall performance of the system by reducing the number of available robots. In this paper, we propose to solve the battery management problem by using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). We first formulate the battery management problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Then we show the state-of-the-art DRL method which uses Gaussian noise to enforce exploration could perform poorly in the formulated MDP, and present a novel algorithm called TD3-ARL that performs effective exploration by regulating the magnitude of the outputted action. Finally, extensive empirical evaluations confirm the superiority of our algorithm over the state-of-the-art and the rule-based policies.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Alibaba Group through Alibaba Innovative Research (AIR) Program and Alibaba-NTU Joint Research Institute (JRI), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
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Deng, Y., An, B., Qiu, Z., Li, L., Wang, Y., Xu, Y. (2020). Battery Management for Automated Warehouses via Deep Reinforcement Learning. In: Taylor, M.E., Yu, Y., Elkind, E., Gao, Y. (eds) Distributed Artificial Intelligence. DAI 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12547. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64096-5_9
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