ReflecSched: Solving Dynamic Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling via LLM-Powered Hierarchical Reflection

Abstract: Dynamic Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling (DFJSP) is an NP-hard problem challenged by real-time event adaptation and complex machine routing. While traditional dispatching rules are efficient but rigid, deep learning approaches are opaque and require intricate feature engineering. LLMs promise adaptive reasoning without this engineering overhead, yet we find their direct application is suboptimal. Baseline LLMs suffer from three key pitfalls: the long-context paradox, where crucial data is underutilized; an underutilization of expert heuristics; and myopic decision-making. To address this, we propose ReflecSched, a framework that empowers the LLM beyond a direct scheduler by equipping it with a strategic analysis capability. ReflecSched tasks the LLM to analyze heuristic-driven simulations across multiple planning horizons and distill them into a concise, natural-language summary termed ``Strategic Experience''. This summary is then integrated into the prompt of a final decision-making module, guiding it to produce non-myopic actions. Experiments show that ReflecSched not only statistically significantly outperforms direct LLM baselines, securing a 71.35\% Win Rate and a 2.755\% Relative Percentage Deviation reduction, but also surpasses the performance of all individual heuristics evaluated, all while demonstrably mitigating the three identified pitfalls. Additionally, ReflecSched performs on par with the best heuristic tailored to each instance across all problem cases.