A Deep Q-Network for the Beer Game with Partial Information
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The beer game is a decentralized, multi-agent, cooperative problem that can be modeled as a serial supply chain network in which agents cooperatively attempt to minimize the total cost of the network even though each agent can only observe its own local information. We develop a variant of the Deep Q-Network algorithm to solve this problem. Extensive numerical experiment show the effectiveness of our algorithm. Unlike most algorithms in literature, our algorithm does not have any limits on the parameter values, and it provides good solutions even if the agents do not follow a rational policy. The algorithm can be extended to other decentralized multi-agent cooperative games with partially observed information, which is a common type of situation in supply chain problems.
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