A deep reinforcement learning based multi-criteria decision support system for optimizing textile chemical process

Abstract

Textile manufacturing is a typical traditional industry involving high complexity in interconnected processes with limited capacity on the application of modern technologies. Decision-making in this domain generally takes multiple criteria into consideration, which usually arouses more complexity. To address this issue, the present paper proposes a decision support system that combines the intelligent data-based models of random forest (RF) and a human knowledge-based multi-criteria structure of analytical hierarchical process (AHP) in accordance with the objective and the subjective factors of the textile manufacturing process. More importantly, the textile chemical manufacturing process is described as the Markov decision process (MDP) paradigm, and a deep reinforcement learning scheme, the Deep Q-networks (DQN), is employed to optimize it. The effectiveness of this system has been validated in a case study of optimizing a textile ozonation process, showing that it can better master the challenging decision-making tasks in textile chemical manufacturing processes.