2022/07/20 by Qiaoyue Tang, Yangzhe Kong, Tang, Qiaoyue +5 · 2 citations
Engineering · Social Sciences · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #Transportation Planning and Optimization #Transportation and Mobility Innovations #Vehicle Routing Optimization Methods #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2207.09860
openalex publication_date 2022/07/20 · openalex created_date 2022/07/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) in real-world applications often come with various constraints, therefore bring additional computational challenges to exact solution methods or heuristic search approaches. The recent idea to learn heuristic move patterns from sample data has become increasingly promising to reduce solution developing costs. However, using learning-based approaches to address more types of constrained VRP remains a challenge. The difficulty lies in controlling for constraint violations while searching for optimal solutions. To overcome this challenge, we propose a Reinforcement Learning based method to solve soft-constrained VRPs by incorporating the Lagrangian relaxation technique and using constrained policy optimization. We apply the method on three common types of VRPs, the Travelling Salesman Problem with Time Windows (TSPTW), the Capacitated VRP (CVRP) and the Capacitated VRP with Time Windows (CVRPTW), to show the generalizability of the proposed method. After comparing to existing RL-based methods and open-source heuristic solvers, we demonstrate its competitive performance in finding solutions with a good balance in travel distance, constraint violations and inference speed.