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arXiv · 2002.08539

Learn to Design the Heuristics for Vehicle Routing Problem

Lei Gao·Mingxiang Chen·Qichang Chen·Ganzhong Luo·Nuoyi Zhu·Zhixin Liu
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Abstract

This paper presents an approach to learn the local-search heuristics that iteratively improves the solution of Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). A local-search heuristics is composed of a destroy operator that destructs a candidate solution, and a following repair operator that rebuilds the destructed one into a new one. The proposed neural network, as trained through actor-critic framework, consists of an encoder in form of a modified version of Graph Attention Network where node embeddings and edge embeddings are integrated, and a GRU-based decoder rendering a pair of destroy and repair operators. Experiment results show that it outperforms both the traditional heuristics algorithms and the existing neural combinatorial optimization for VRP on medium-scale data set, and is able to tackle the large-scale data set (e.g., over 400 nodes) which is a considerable challenge in this area. Moreover, the need for expertise and handcrafted heuristics design is eliminated due to the fact that the proposed network learns to design the heuristics with a better performance. Our implementation is available online.

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Lei Gao, Mingxiang Chen, Qichang Chen, Ganzhong Luo, Nuoyi Zhu, Zhixin Liu. 2020-02-20. Learn to Design the Heuristics for Vehicle Routing Problem. https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.08539

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