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Related papers: Attention, Learn to Solve Routing Problems!

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Many real-world vehicle routing problems involve rich sets of constraints with respect to the capacities of the vehicles, time windows for customers etc. While in recent years first machine learning models have been developed to solve basic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Jonas K. Falkner , Lars Schmidt-Thieme

The Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a classical combinatorial optimisation problem. Deep learning has been successfully extended to meta-learning, where previous solving efforts assist in learning how to optimise future optimisation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Nasrin Sultana , Jeffrey Chan , A. K. Qin , Tabinda Sarwar

Neural Combinatorial Optimization aims to learn to solve a class of combinatorial problems through data-driven methods and notably through employing neural networks by learning the underlying distribution of problem instances. While, so far…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Daniela Thyssens , Tim Dernedde , Wilson Sentanoe , Lars Schmidt-Thieme

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a complex optimization problem with numerous real-world applications, mostly solved using metaheuristic algorithms due to its $\mathcal{NP}$-Hard nature. Traditionally, these metaheuristics rely on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Bachtiar Herdianto , Romain Billot , Flavien Lucas , Marc Sevaux

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is the most popular and most studied combinatorial problem, starting with von Neumann in 1951. It has driven the discovery of several optimization techniques such as cutting planes, branch-and-bound,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Xavier Bresson , Thomas Laurent

The Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (OPTW) is a combinatorial optimization problem where the goal is to maximize the total score collected from different visited locations. The application of neural network models to combinatorial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Ricardo Gama , Hugo L. Fernandes

Routing problems are a class of combinatorial problems with many practical applications. Recently, end-to-end deep learning methods have been proposed to learn approximate solution heuristics for such problems. In contrast, classical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Wouter Kool , Herke van Hoof , Joaquim Gromicho , Max Welling

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Qiaoyue Tang , Yangzhe Kong , Lemeng Pan , Choonmeng Lee

End-to-end training of neural network solvers for graph combinatorial optimization problems such as the Travelling Salesperson Problem (TSP) have seen a surge of interest recently, but remain intractable and inefficient beyond graphs with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Chaitanya K. Joshi , Quentin Cappart , Louis-Martin Rousseau , Thomas Laurent

Backtracking search algorithms are often used to solve the Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). The efficiency of backtracking search depends greatly on the variable ordering heuristics. Currently, the most commonly used heuristics are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Wen Song , Zhiguang Cao , Jie Zhang , Andrew Lim

This paper presents a framework to tackle combinatorial optimization problems using neural networks and reinforcement learning. We focus on the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and train a recurrent network that, given a set of city…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-01-16 Irwan Bello , Hieu Pham , Quoc V. Le , Mohammad Norouzi , Samy Bengio

Reinforcement learning has recently shown promise in learning quality solutions in many combinatorial optimization problems. In particular, the attention-based encoder-decoder models show high effectiveness on various routing problems,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-06 Aigerim Bogyrbayeva , Taehyun Yoon , Hanbum Ko , Sungbin Lim , Hyokun Yun , Changhyun Kwon

TSP (Traveling Salesman Problem), a classic NP-complete problem in combinatorial optimization, is of great significance in multiple fields. Exact algorithms for TSP are not practical due to their exponential time cost. Thus, approximate…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Yang Li , Junbin Gao , Mingyuan Bai , Chengjun Li , Gang Liu

This paper provides a systematic overview of machine learning methods applied to solve NP-hard Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs). Recently, there has been a great interest from both machine learning and operations research communities to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-06 Aigerim Bogyrbayeva , Meraryslan Meraliyev , Taukekhan Mustakhov , Bissenbay Dauletbayev

Model-free deep-reinforcement-based learning algorithms have been applied to a range of COPs~\cite{bello2016neural}~\cite{kool2018attention}~\cite{nazari2018reinforcement}. However, these approaches suffer from two key challenges when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Nasrin Sultana , Jeffrey Chan , Tabinda Sarwar , A. K. Qin

Learning how to automatically solve optimization problems has the potential to provide the next big leap in optimization technology. The performance of automatically learned heuristics on routing problems has been steadily improving in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-01 André Hottung , Kevin Tierney

Routing Problems are central to many real-world applications, yet remain challenging due to their (NP-)hard nature. Amongst existing approaches, heuristics often offer the best trade-off between quality and scalability, making them suitable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Felix Chalumeau , Refiloe Shabe , Noah De Nicola , Arnu Pretorius , Thomas D. Barrett , Nathan Grinsztajn

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for neural combinatorial optimization, enabling models to learn heuristics that solve complex problems without requiring expert knowledge. Despite significant progress, existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Mingjun Pan , Guanquan Lin , You-Wei Luo , Bin Zhu , Zhien Dai , Lijun Sun , Chun Yuan

Recent researches show that machine learning has the potential to learn better heuristics than the one designed by human for solving combinatorial optimization problems. The deep neural network is used to characterize the input instance for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-11 Bo Peng , Jiahai Wang , Zizhen Zhang

This article explores the integration of deep learning models into combinatorial optimization pipelines, specifically targeting NP-hard problems. Traditional exact algorithms for such problems often rely on heuristic criteria to guide the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Lorenzo Sciandra , Roberto Esposito , Andrea Cesare Grosso , Laura Sacerdote , Cristina Zucca