Efficient truck dispatching via Reinforcement Learning (RL) in open-pit mining is often hindered by reliance on complex reward engineering and value-based methods. This paper introduces Curriculum-inspired Adaptive Direct Policy Guidance, a novel curriculum learning strategy for policy-based RL to address these issues. We adapt Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for mine dispatching's uneven decision intervals using time deltas in Temporal Difference and Generalized Advantage Estimation, and employ a Shortest Processing Time teacher policy for guided exploration via policy regularization and adaptive guidance. Evaluations in OpenMines demonstrate our approach yields a 10% performance gain and faster convergence over standard PPO across sparse and dense reward settings, showcasing improved robustness to reward design. This direct policy guidance method provides a general and effective curriculum learning technique for RL-based truck dispatching, enabling future work on advanced architectures.
View on arXiv@article{meng2025_2502.20845,
title={ Reinforcement Learning with Curriculum-inspired Adaptive Direct Policy Guidance for Truck Dispatching },
author={ Shi Meng and Bin Tian and Xiaotong Zhang },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.20845},
year={ 2025 }
}