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Combinatorial optimization has found applications in numerous fields, from aerospace to transportation planning and economics. The goal is to find an optimal solution among a finite set of possibilities. The well-known challenge one faces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-03 Quentin Cappart , Thierry Moisan , Louis-Martin Rousseau , Isabeau Prémont-Schwarz , Andre Cire

Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has emerged as a promising learning-based paradigm for addressing Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) by minimizing the need for extensive manual engineering. While existing NCO methods, trained on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Yuanyao Chen , Rongsheng Chen , Fu Luo , Zhenkun Wang

Vehicle routing problems (VRPs), which can be found in numerous real-world applications, have been an important research topic for several decades. Recently, the neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) approach that leverages a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Fei Liu , Xi Lin , Zhenkun Wang , Qingfu Zhang , Xialiang Tong , Mingxuan Yuan

The vehicle routing problem is a well known class of NP-hard combinatorial optimisation problems in literature. Traditional solution methods involve either carefully designed heuristics, or time-consuming metaheuristics. Recent work in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Harshad Khadilkar

This paper gives a detailed review of reinforcement learning (RL) in combinatorial optimization, introduces the history of combinatorial optimization starting in the 1950s, and compares it with the RL algorithms of recent years. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Yunhao Yang , Andrew Whinston

For NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, it is usually difficult to find high-quality solutions in polynomial time. The design of either an exact algorithm or an approximate algorithm for these problems often requires significantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-07 Kun Lei , Peng Guo , Yi Wang , Xiao Wu , Wenchao Zhao

The traveling purchaser problem (TPP) is an important combinatorial optimization problem with broad applications. Due to the coupling between routing and purchasing, existing works on TPPs commonly address route construction and purchase…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-03 Haofeng Yuan , Rongping Zhu , Wanlu Yang , Shiji Song , Keyou You , Wei Fan , C. L. Philip Chen

Existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based methods for solving the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) intrinsically cope with homogeneous vehicle fleet, in which the fleet is assumed as repetitions of a single vehicle. Hence,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Jingwen Li , Yining Ma , Ruize Gao , Zhiguang Cao , Andrew Lim , Wen Song , Jie Zhang

Recent neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) methods have shown promising problem-solving ability without requiring domain-specific expertise. Most existing NCO methods use training and testing data with a fixed constraint value and lack…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Fu Luo , Yaoxin Wu , Zhi Zheng , Zhenkun Wang

Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has emerged as a powerful framework for solving combinatorial optimization problems by integrating deep learning-based models. This work focuses on improving existing inference techniques to enhance…

Learning to solve combinatorial optimization problems, such as the vehicle routing problem, offers great computational advantages over classical operations research solvers and heuristics. The recently developed deep reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-06 Daniela Thyssens , Jonas Falkner , Lars Schmidt-Thieme

Many traditional algorithms for solving combinatorial optimization problems involve using hand-crafted heuristics that sequentially construct a solution. Such heuristics are designed by domain experts and may often be suboptimal due to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Nina Mazyavkina , Sergey Sviridov , Sergei Ivanov , Evgeny Burnaev

Managing disruptions in railway traffic management is a major challenge. Rising traffic density and infrastructure limits increase complexity, making the Vehicle Routing and Scheduling Problem (VRSP) difficult to solve reliably and in real…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Alberto Castagna , Stefan Zahlner , Adrian Egli , Christian Eichenberger , Daniel Boos , Manuel Meyer , Anton Fuxjager

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as a powerful framework for solving sequential decision-making problems, achieving remarkable success in a wide range of applications, including game AI, autonomous driving, biomedicine, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Yinghan Sun , Hongxi Wang , Hua Chen , Wei Zhang

Since the 1990s, considerable empirical work has been carried out to train statistical models, such as neural networks (NNs), as learned heuristics for combinatorial optimization (CO) problems. When successful, such an approach eliminates…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-21 Orit Davidovich , Shimrit Shtern , Segev Wasserkrug , Nimrod Megiddo

Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) are an extension of the Traveling Salesperson Problem and are a fundamental NP-hard challenge in combinatorial optimization. Solving VRP in real-time at large scale has become critical in numerous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Ido Greenberg , Piotr Sielski , Hugo Linsenmaier , Rajesh Gandham , Shie Mannor , Alex Fender , Gal Chechik , Eli Meirom

This paper introduces and formalizes the Dynamic and Stochastic Vehicle Routing Problem with Emission Quota (DS-QVRP-RR), a novel routing problems that integrates dynamic demand acceptance and routing with a global emission constraint. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Farid Najar , Dominique Barth , Yann Strozecki

Machine learning has been adapted to help solve NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. One prevalent way is learning to construct solutions by deep neural networks, which has been receiving more and more attention due to the high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Chengrui Gao , Haopu Shang , Ke Xue , Dong Li , Chao Qian

Reinforcement Learning and, recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning are popular methods for solving sequential decision-making problems modeled as Markov Decision Processes. RL modeling of a problem and selecting algorithms and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Reza Refaei Afshar , Joaquin Vanschoren , Uzay Kaymak , Rui Zhang , Yaoxin Wu , Wen Song , Yingqian Zhang

The Vehicle Routing Problem with Drones (VRPD) seeks to optimize the routing paths for both trucks and drones, where the trucks are responsible for delivering parcels to customer locations, and the drones are dispatched from these trucks…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Navid Mohammad Imran , Myounggyu Won