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Complex real-life routing challenges can be modeled as variations of well-known combinatorial optimization problems. These routing problems have long been studied and are difficult to solve at scale. The particular setting may also make…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Marijn van Knippenberg , Mike Holenderski , Vlado Menkovski

Capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is being one of the most common optimization problems in our days, considering the wide usage of routing algorithms in multiple fields such as transportation domain, food delivery, network routing,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Hassan Moussa

Recently, the applications of the methodologies of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to NP-Hard Combinatorial optimization problems have become a popular topic. This is essentially due to the nature of the traditional combinatorial algorithms,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-02 Simone Foa , Corrado Coppola , Giorgio Grani , Laura Palagi

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

The vehicle routing problem with two-dimensional loading constraints (2L-CVRP) and the last-in-first-out (LIFO) rule presents significant practical and algorithmic challenges. While numerous heuristic approaches have been proposed to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Yifan Xia , Xiangyi Zhang

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

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

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 Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) is a fundamental NP-hard problem with broad applications in logistics and transportation. Real-world CVRPs often involve diverse objectives and complex constraints, such as time windows or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Wen Wang , Xiangchen Wu , Liang Wang , Hao Hu , Xianping Tao

The application of learning based methods to vehicle routing problems has emerged as a pivotal area of research in combinatorial optimization. These problems are characterized by vast solution spaces and intricate constraints, making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Zhenwei Wang , Ruibin Bai , Tiehua Zhang

Neural Combinatorial Optimisation (NCO) is a promising learning-based approach for solving Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) without extensive manual design. While existing constructive NCO methods typically follow an appending-based paradigm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Fu Luo , Xi Lin , Mengyuan Zhong , Fei Liu , Zhenkun Wang , Jianyong Sun , Qingfu Zhang

Value-function-based methods have long played an important role in reinforcement learning. However, finding the best next action given a value function of arbitrary complexity is nontrivial when the action space is too large for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Arthur Delarue , Ross Anderson , Christian Tjandraatmadja

Machine learning has increasingly been employed to solve NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, resulting in the emergence of neural solvers that demonstrate remarkable performance, even with minimal domain-specific knowledge. To…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-27 Chengrui Gao , Haopu Shang , Ke Xue , Chao Qian

There has never been a more exciting time for the future of quantum computing than now. Near-term quantum computing usage is now the next XPRIZE. With that challenge in mind we have explored a new approach as a hybrid quantum-classical…

Emerging Technologies · Computer Science 2024-04-23 James Holliday , Braeden Morgan , Hugh Churchill , Khoa Luu

We present an end-to-end framework for solving the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) using reinforcement learning. In this approach, we train a single model that finds near-optimal solutions for problem instances sampled from a given…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-23 Mohammadreza Nazari , Afshin Oroojlooy , Lawrence V. Snyder , Martin Takáč

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based combinatorial optimization (CO) methods (i.e., DRL-NCO) have shown significant merit over the conventional CO solvers as DRL-NCO is capable of learning CO solvers less relying on problem-specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-06 Minsu Kim , Junyoung Park , Jinkyoo Park

This study presents an in-depth computational analysis of four well-known Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) formulations with polynomial number of subtour elimination constraints: a node-based formulation and three arc-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-10-02 Deniz Aksen , Temel Oncan , Mir Ehsan Hesam Sadati

Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has emerged as a promising approach for NP-hard problems. However, prevailing RL-based methods suffer from low sample efficiency due to sparse rewards and underused solutions. We propose Best-anchored…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Zijun Liao , Jinbiao Chen , Debing Wang , Zizhen Zhang , Jiahai Wang

We investigate a structural decomposition for the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) based on vehicle-to-customer "assignment" and visits "sequencing" decision variables. We show that an heuristic search focused on assignment…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-03-19 Túlio A. M. Toffolo , Thibaut Vidal , Tony Wauters

We investigate the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) under a robotics context, where a vehicle with limited payload must complete delivery (or pickup) tasks to serve a set of geographically distributed customers with varying…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Kai Gao , Jingjin Yu