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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2024
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06040 |
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Table of Contents:
- Districting-and-routing is a strategic problem aiming to aggregate basic geographical units (e.g., zip codes) into delivery districts. Its goal is to minimize the expected long-term routing cost of performing deliveries in each district separately. Solving this stochastic problem poses critical challenges since repeatedly evaluating routing costs on a set of scenarios while searching for optimal districts takes considerable time. Consequently, solution approaches usually replace the true cost estimation with continuous cost approximation formulas extending Beardwood-Halton-Hammersley and Daganzo's work. These formulas commit errors that can be magnified during the optimization step. To reconcile speed and solution quality, we introduce a supervised learning and optimization methodology leveraging a graph neural network for delivery-cost estimation. This network is trained to imitate known costs generated on a limited subset of training districts. It is used within an iterated local search procedure to produce high-quality districting plans. Our computational experiments, conducted on five metropolitan areas in the United Kingdom, demonstrate that the graph neural network predicts long-term district cost operations more accurately, and that optimizing over this oracle permits large economic gains (10.12% on average) over baseline methods that use continuous approximation formulas or shallow neural networks. Finally, we observe that having compact districts alone does not guarantee high-quality solutions and that other learnable geometrical features of the districts play an essential role.