A bidirectional graph neural network for traveling salesman problems on arbitrary symmetric graphs

Deep learning has recently been shown to provide great achievement to the traveling salesman problem (TSP) on the Euclidean graphs. These methods usually fully represent the graph by a set of coordinates, and then captures graph information from the coordinates to generate the solution. The TSP on a...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Engineering applications of artificial intelligence Vol. 97; p. 104061
Main Authors: Hu, Yujiao, Zhang, Zhen, Yao, Yuan, Huyan, Xingpeng, Zhou, Xingshe, Lee, Wee Sun
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.01.2021
Subjects:
Combinatorial optimization problems
Deep learning
Graph neural network
Planning
Traveling salesman problem
Deep learning
Traveling salesman problem
Combinatorial optimization problems
Planning
Graph neural network
ISSN:0952-1976, 1873-6769
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Deep learning has recently been shown to provide great achievement to the traveling salesman problem (TSP) on the Euclidean graphs. These methods usually fully represent the graph by a set of coordinates, and then captures graph information from the coordinates to generate the solution. The TSP on arbitrary symmetric graphs models more realistic applications where the working graphs maybe sparse, or the distance between points on the graphs may not satisfy the triangle inequality. When prior learning-based methods being applied to the TSP on arbitrary symmetric graphs, they are not capable to capture graph features that are beneficial to produce near-optimal solutions. Moreover, they suffer from serious exploration problems. This paper proposes a bidirectional graph neural network (BGNN) for the arbitrary symmetric TSP. The network learns to produce the next city to visit sequentially by imitation learning. The bidirectional message passing layer is designed as the most important component of BGNN. It is able to encode graphs based on edges and partial solutions. By this way, the proposed approach is much possible to construct near-optimal solutions for the TSP on arbitrary symmetric graphs, and it is able to be combined with informed search to further improve performance.
ISSN:0952-1976
1873-6769
DOI:10.1016/j.engappai.2020.104061