Intelligent Scheduling of Rail-Guided Shuttle Cars via Deep Reinforcement Learning Integrating Dynamic Graph Neural Networks and Transformer Model

With the rapid development of e-commerce and smart manufacturing, automated warehouse systems have become critical infrastructure for modern logistics. In China’s vast market, the dynamic scheduling of Rail-Guided Vehicles (RGVs) faces significant challenges due to complex task uncertainties, hierarchical supply chain structures, and real-time collision avoidance requirements. Traditional rule-based methods and static optimization models often fail to adapt to such dynamic environments. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel hybrid deep reinforcement learning framework integrating a Dynamic Graph Neural Network (DGNN) and a Transformer model. The DGNN captures the spatiotemporal dependencies of the warehouse network topology, while the Transformer mechanism enhances long-range feature extraction for task prioritization. Furthermore, we design a centralized Deep Q-network (DQN) framework with parameterized action spaces to coordinate multiple RGVs collaboratively. While the system manages multiple physical vehicles, the learning architecture employs a single-agent global scheduler to avoid the non-stationarity issues inherent in multi-agent reinforcement learning. Experimental results based on real-world data from a large-scale electronics manufacturing warehouse demonstrate that our method reduces average task completion time by 18.5% and improves system throughput by 22.3% compared to state-of-the-art baselines. The proposed approach demonstrates potential for intelligent warehouse management in dynamic industrial scenarios.