DSevolve: Enabling Real-Time Adaptive Scheduling on Dynamic Shop Floor with LLM-Evolved Heuristic Portfolios

arXiv cs.AI / 3/31/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces DSevolve, a scheduling framework designed for dynamic shop-floor disruptions where machine breakdowns and new orders continuously change the optimal dispatching strategy.
  • Unlike prior LLM-powered automatic heuristic design approaches that converge to a single “elite” rule, DSevolve evolves an offline, quality-diverse portfolio of dispatching heuristics and selects among them online with second-level response time.
  • It builds a behaviorally diverse rule archive using MAP-Elites indexing with multi-persona seeding and topology-aware evolutionary operators, enabling richer coverage of different scheduling scenarios.
  • For each disruption event, DSevolve uses probe-based fingerprinting to characterize the current shop-floor state, retrieves relevant candidate rules from an offline knowledge base, and chooses the best rule via rapid look-ahead simulation.
  • In experiments on 500 dynamic flexible job shop instances derived from real industrial data, DSevolve outperforms existing AHD methods, classical dispatching rules, genetic programming, and deep reinforcement learning, positioning it as a deployable approach for real-time intelligent scheduling.

Abstract

In dynamic manufacturing environments, disruptions such as machine breakdowns and new order arrivals continuously shift the optimal dispatching strategy, making adaptive rule selection essential. Existing LLM-powered Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) frameworks evolve toward a single elite rule that cannot meet this adaptability demand. To address this, we present DSevolve, an industrial scheduling framework that evolves a quality-diverse portfolio of dispatching rules offline and adaptively deploys them online with second-level response time. Multi-persona seeding and topology-aware evolutionary operators produce a behaviorally diverse rule archive indexed by a MAP-Elites feature space. Upon each disruption event, a probe-based fingerprinting mechanism characterizes the current shop floor state, retrieves high-quality candidate rules from an offline knowledge base, and selects the best one via rapid look-ahead simulation. Evaluated on 500 dynamic flexible job shop instances derived from real industrial data, DSevolve outperforms state-of-the-art AHD frameworks, classical dispatching rules, genetic programming, and deep reinforcement learning, offering a practical and deployable solution for intelligent shop floor scheduling.