| Title | Human-Machine Collaborative Optimization via Apprenticeship Scheduling |
| Publication Type | Journal Article |
| Year of Publication | 2018 |
| Authors | Gombolay, M., R. Jensen, J. Stigile, T. Golen, N. Shah, S-H. Son, and J. Shah |
| Journal | Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) (Accepted 02/2018—To Appear) |
| Keywords | topic2 |
| Abstract | Coordinating agents to complete a set of tasks with intercoupled temporal and resource constraints is computationally challenging, yet human domain experts can solve these difficult scheduling problems using paradigms learned through years of apprenticeship. A process for manually codifying this domain knowledge within a computational framework is necessary to scale beyond the "single-expert, single-trainee" apprenticeship model. However, human domain experts often have difficulty describing their decision-making processes, causing the codification of this knowledge to become laborious. We propose a new approach for capturing domain-expert heuristics through a pairwise ranking formulation. Our approach is model-free and does not require enumerating or iterating through a large state space. We empirically demonstrate that this approach accurately learns multifaceted heuristics on a synthetic data set incorporating job-shop scheduling and vehicle routing problems, as well as on two real-world data sets consisting of demonstrations of experts solving a weapon-to-target assignment problem and a hospital resource allocation problem. We also demonstrate that policies learned from human scheduling demonstration via apprenticeship learning can substantially improve the efficiency of a branch-and-bound search for an optimal schedule. We employ this human-machine collaborative optimization technique on a variant of the weapon-to-target assignment problem. We demonstrate that this technique generates solutions substantially superior to those produced by human domain experts at a rate up to 9.5 times faster than an optimization approach and can be applied to optimally solve problems twice as complex as those solved by a human demonstrator. |
| URL | https://interactive.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Gombolay_JAIR_2018.pdf |
