Abstract Details
138 / 2023-09-20 23:05:11
Learning to Optimize Vehicle Routes Problem: A Two-Stage Hybrid Reinforcement Learning
vehicle routing problem,imitation learning,deep reinforcement learning
Final Paper
The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a typical combinatorial optimization problem, aiming to determine the optimal customer visit routes while minimizing the total cost under certain constraints. However, for solving large-scale VRP instances, traditional heuristic optimization algorithms could hardly meet the demands of both solution accuracy and computational efficiency. Thus learning-based methods have recently garnered more attention. Some work attempts to solve the problems by reinforcement learning methods, which suffer from slow convergence issues during training and are still not accurate enough regarding the solutions. To that end, this paper proposes a two-stage hybrid algorithm based on imitation learning and reinforcement learning for solving the vehicle routing problem. Firstly, we introduce a novel imitation learning framework, where classical heuristic methods are treated as experts to encourage policy models to mimic and generate similar or better solutions. which accelerates the convergence more stably and accurately. Secondly, by employing deep reinforcement learning methods, we further train neural networks to improve their performance in generating superior solutions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach exhibits significant performance improvements on multiple instances of vehicle routing problems, outperforming a wide range of baselines and getting results close to highly optimized and specialized algorithms. Additionally, our method possesses a degree of generalization capability, allowing it to adapt to vehicle routing problems of varying scales.
Important Date
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Conference Date
Nov 02
2023
toNov 04
2023
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Dec 15 2023
Draft paper submission deadline
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Dec 20 2023
Registration deadline
Sponsored By
IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society
Xidian University
Xidian University
Contact Information
Previous Conferences
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2022-11-30 China Harbin
International Conference on Sensing, Measurement & Data Analytics in the era of Artificial Intelligence -
2021-10-21 China Nanjing
2021 International Conference on Sensing, Measurement and Data Analytics in the era of Artificial Intelligence -
2020-10-15 China Xi'an
International Conference on Sensing, Measurement and Data Analytics in the era of Artificial Intelligence
