Conditional Neural Heuristic for Multiobjective Vehicle Routing Problems

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Názov: Conditional Neural Heuristic for Multiobjective Vehicle Routing Problems
Autori: Mingfeng Fan, Yaoxin Wu, Zhiguang Cao, Wen Song, Guillaume Sartoretti, Huan Liu, Guohua Wu
Zdroj: IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems. 36:4677-4689
Informácie o vydavateľovi: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2025.
Rok vydania: 2025
Predmety: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Pareto optimization, Theory and Algorithms, Decoding, Transportation, Encoder-decoder, Vehicle routing, vehicle routing problems, neural heuristic, Context modeling, Training, Encoder–decoder, multiobjective optimization, Fans, Neural networks
Popis: Existing neural heuristics for multiobjective vehicle routing problems (MOVRPs) are primarily conditioned on instance context, which failed to appropriately exploit preference and problem size, thus holding back the performance. To thoroughly unleash the potential, we propose a novel conditional neural heuristic (CNH) that fully leverages the instance context, preference, and size with an encoder-decoder structured policy network. Particularly, in our CNH, we design a dual-attention-based encoder to relate preferences and instance contexts, so as to better capture their joint effect on approximating the exact Pareto front (PF). We also design a size-aware decoder based on the sinusoidal encoding to explicitly incorporate the problem size into the embedding, so that a single trained model could better solve instances of various scales. Besides, we customize the REINFORCE algorithm to train the neural heuristic by leveraging stochastic preferences (SPs), which further enhances the training performance. Extensive experimental results on random and benchmark instances reveal that our CNH could achieve favorable approximation to the whole PF with higher hypervolume (HV) and lower optimality gap (Gap) than those of the existing neural and conventional heuristics. More importantly, a single trained model of our CNH can outperform other neural heuristics that are exclusively trained on each size. In addition, the effectiveness of the key designs is also verified through ablation studies.
Druh dokumentu: Article
Popis súboru: application/pdf
ISSN: 2162-2388
2162-237X
DOI: 10.1109/tnnls.2024.3371706
Prístupová URL adresa: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38517723
https://research.tue.nl/en/publications/cf1444fb-b68d-43eb-979c-4217ed876831
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNNLS.2024.3371706
Rights: IEEE Copyright
taverne
CC BY NC ND
Prístupové číslo: edsair.doi.dedup.....1fb39e2bc4e3546e72f3ae606f7623c7
Databáza: OpenAIRE
Popis
Abstrakt:Existing neural heuristics for multiobjective vehicle routing problems (MOVRPs) are primarily conditioned on instance context, which failed to appropriately exploit preference and problem size, thus holding back the performance. To thoroughly unleash the potential, we propose a novel conditional neural heuristic (CNH) that fully leverages the instance context, preference, and size with an encoder-decoder structured policy network. Particularly, in our CNH, we design a dual-attention-based encoder to relate preferences and instance contexts, so as to better capture their joint effect on approximating the exact Pareto front (PF). We also design a size-aware decoder based on the sinusoidal encoding to explicitly incorporate the problem size into the embedding, so that a single trained model could better solve instances of various scales. Besides, we customize the REINFORCE algorithm to train the neural heuristic by leveraging stochastic preferences (SPs), which further enhances the training performance. Extensive experimental results on random and benchmark instances reveal that our CNH could achieve favorable approximation to the whole PF with higher hypervolume (HV) and lower optimality gap (Gap) than those of the existing neural and conventional heuristics. More importantly, a single trained model of our CNH can outperform other neural heuristics that are exclusively trained on each size. In addition, the effectiveness of the key designs is also verified through ablation studies.
ISSN:21622388
2162237X
DOI:10.1109/tnnls.2024.3371706