Efficient Neural Collaborative Search for Pickup and Delivery Problems

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Bibliographische Detailangaben
Titel: Efficient Neural Collaborative Search for Pickup and Delivery Problems
Autoren: Detian Kong, Yining Ma, Zhiguang Cao, Tianshu Yu, Jianhua Xiao
Quelle: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 46:11019-11034
Verlagsinformationen: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2024.
Publikationsjahr: 2024
Schlagwörter: deep reinforcement learning, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Theory and Algorithms, Learning to optimize, pickup and delivery, neighborhood search, attention mechanism
Beschreibung: In this paper, we introduce Neural Collaborative Search (NCS), a novel learning-based framework for efficiently solving pickup and delivery problems (PDPs). NCS pioneers the collaboration between the latest prevalent neural construction and neural improvement models, establishing a collaborative framework where an improvement model iteratively refines solutions initiated by a construction model. Our NCS collaboratively trains the two models via reinforcement learning with an effective shared-critic mechanism. In addition, the construction model enhances the improvement model with high-quality initial solutions via curriculum learning, while the improvement model accelerates the convergence of the construction model through imitation learning. Besides the new framework design, we also propose the efficient Neural Neighborhood Search (N2S), an efficient improvement model employed within the NCS framework. N2S exploits a tailored Markov decision process formulation and two customized decoders for removing and then reinserting a pair of pickup-delivery nodes, thereby learning a ruin-repair search process for addressing the precedence constraints in PDPs efficiently. To balance the computation cost between encoders and decoders, N2S streamlines the existing encoder design through a light Synthesis Attention mechanism that allows the vanilla self-attention to synthesize various features regarding a route solution. Moreover, a diversity enhancement scheme is further leveraged to ameliorate the performance during the inference of N2S. Our NCS and N2S are both generic, and extensive experiments on two canonical PDP variants show that they can produce state-of-the-art results among existing neural methods. Remarkably, our NCS and N2S could surpass the well-known LKH3 solver especially on the more constrained PDP variant.
Publikationsart: Article
Dateibeschreibung: application/pdf
ISSN: 1939-3539
0162-8828
DOI: 10.1109/tpami.2024.3450850
Zugangs-URL: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39226195
Rights: IEEE Copyright
CC BY NC ND
Dokumentencode: edsair.doi.dedup.....b508bafdcfe4d52c6f76c38a15da9505
Datenbank: OpenAIRE
Beschreibung
Abstract:In this paper, we introduce Neural Collaborative Search (NCS), a novel learning-based framework for efficiently solving pickup and delivery problems (PDPs). NCS pioneers the collaboration between the latest prevalent neural construction and neural improvement models, establishing a collaborative framework where an improvement model iteratively refines solutions initiated by a construction model. Our NCS collaboratively trains the two models via reinforcement learning with an effective shared-critic mechanism. In addition, the construction model enhances the improvement model with high-quality initial solutions via curriculum learning, while the improvement model accelerates the convergence of the construction model through imitation learning. Besides the new framework design, we also propose the efficient Neural Neighborhood Search (N2S), an efficient improvement model employed within the NCS framework. N2S exploits a tailored Markov decision process formulation and two customized decoders for removing and then reinserting a pair of pickup-delivery nodes, thereby learning a ruin-repair search process for addressing the precedence constraints in PDPs efficiently. To balance the computation cost between encoders and decoders, N2S streamlines the existing encoder design through a light Synthesis Attention mechanism that allows the vanilla self-attention to synthesize various features regarding a route solution. Moreover, a diversity enhancement scheme is further leveraged to ameliorate the performance during the inference of N2S. Our NCS and N2S are both generic, and extensive experiments on two canonical PDP variants show that they can produce state-of-the-art results among existing neural methods. Remarkably, our NCS and N2S could surpass the well-known LKH3 solver especially on the more constrained PDP variant.
ISSN:19393539
01628828
DOI:10.1109/tpami.2024.3450850