[online] Abu Dhabi Machine Learning Meetup Season 2 Episode 5

We will conclude the second season of the Abu Dhabi Machine Learning Meetups with an online talk (on Zoom).

Stay tuned for the 3rd season, which will start with an in-person event in Abu Dhabi (more information on this event very soon)!

Thank you to Luis Perez for introducing the speaker to our community!

Talk: Optimizing Supply Chain with Reinforcement Learning and Graph NNs

**Abstract:** Distribution networks are a crucial part of supply chains that often entail highly complex optimization problems. For example, optimizing the transportation cost of multiple kinds of goods over a time horizon with order consolidation requirements is an NP-hard problem. In this presentation, we will explore a distribution problem with such characteristics, called the Shipping Point Assignment (SPA) problem. Inspired by recent advances in combinatorial optimization using reinforcement learning and graph neural networks, we propose a deep Q learning agent with a GNN-based Value Function Approximation to optimize the SPA problem. We compare this agent with other RL-based and deterministic approaches in order to determine whether distribution networks of this kind could be better solved by ML-based techniques.

**Speaker bio:** Javier Porras-Valenzuela is a Computer Scientist based in Costa Rica currently working as a Machine Learning Engineer at Encora. He has a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica (ITCR). He has over seven years of experience in software, six of them as a Machine Learning Engineer working in domains such as supply chain, finance and ad-tech. His areas of interest include Operations Research, Reinforcement Learning, Graph Neural Networks and Natural Language Processing.