Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Shared Resources for Inventory Management

Yuandong Ding, Mingxiao Feng, Guozi Liu, Wei Jiang, Chuheng Zhang, Li Zhao, Lei Song, Houqiang Li, Yan Jin, Jiang Bian

Keywords: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, Inventory Mangement

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the inventory management (IM) problem where we need to make replenishment decisions for a large number of stock keeping units (SKUs) to balance their supply and demand. In our setting, the constraint on the shared resources (such as the inventory capacity) couples the otherwise independent control for each SKU. We formulate the problem with this structure as Shared-Resource Stochastic Game (SRSG) and propose an efficient algorithm called Context-aware Decentralized PPO (CD-PPO). Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that CD-PPO can accelerate the learning procedure compared with standard MARL algorithms.

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TL;DR: We propose a scalable and effective method to control a large number of agents for inventory management.