Chapter 15: Supply Chain Management
Effective supply chain management is a challenge for many businesses, yet it is key to their profitability and competitiveness. The difficulty in this area comes from a complex set of dynamics affecting supply and demand, business constraints around handling them, and a great uncertainty all along. Reinforcement learning provides us with a key set of capabilities to address such sequential decision-making problems.
In this chapter, we particularly focus on two important problems: Inventory and routing optimization. For the former, we go into the details of creating the environment, understanding the variance in the environment, and hyperparameter tuning to effectively solve it using reinforcement learning. For the latter, we describe a realistic vehicle routing problem of a gig driver working to deliver online meal orders. We then proceed to show why conventional neural networks are limiting while solving problems in varying sizes, and how pointer...
