Generalizing Beyond Suboptimality: Offline Reinforcement Learning Learns Effective Scheduling through Random Solutions

Abstract

Online reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have demonstrated strong performance on Job Shop Scheduling (JSP) and Flexible JSP (FJSP) problems by learning scheduling policies through direct interaction with simulated environments. However, these methods often require extensive training interactions, limiting their sample efficiency and practical applicability. Motivated by this challenge, we introduce Conservative Discrete Quantile Actor-Critic (CDQAC), an offline RL algorithm that learns effective scheduling policies directly from static, suboptimal datasets. CDQAC couples a quantile-based critic with delayed policy updates to estimate the return distribution of machine-operation pairs. Extensive experiments on JSP and FJSP benchmarks demonstrate that CDQAC matches or outperforms the data-generating heuristics, outperforms recent offline and online RL baselines for JSP and FJSP, and is highly sample efficient, requiring only 1 to 5% of the original dataset to learn high-quality policies. Our analysis suggests that, for JSP and FJSP, offline RL performance depends more on state-action coverage than on the quality of individual trajectories. FJSP and JSP couple a dense reward aligned with the makespan objective with equal-length trajectories across heuristics, enabling effective learning from a broad range of behaviors. Consistent with this observation, datasets generated by a simple random heuristic with broader coverage let it outperform policies trained on datasets produced by stronger heuristics such as Genetic Algorithms. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/jesserem/CDQAC_scheduling.