RouteExplainer: An Explanation Framework for Vehicle Routing Problem

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Kikuta, Daisuke, Ikeuchi, Hiroki, Tajiri, Kengo, Nakano, Yuusuke
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866911199969411072
author Kikuta, Daisuke
Ikeuchi, Hiroki
Tajiri, Kengo
Nakano, Yuusuke
author_facet Kikuta, Daisuke
Ikeuchi, Hiroki
Tajiri, Kengo
Nakano, Yuusuke
contents The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a widely studied combinatorial optimization problem and has been applied to various practical problems. While the explainability for VRP is significant for improving the reliability and interactivity in practical VRP applications, it remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose RouteExplainer, a post-hoc explanation framework that explains the influence of each edge in a generated route. Our framework realizes this by rethinking a route as the sequence of actions and extending counterfactual explanations based on the action influence model to VRP. To enhance the explanation, we additionally propose an edge classifier that infers the intentions of each edge, a loss function to train the edge classifier, and explanation-text generation by Large Language Models (LLMs). We quantitatively evaluate our edge classifier on four different VRPs. The results demonstrate its rapid computation while maintaining reasonable accuracy, thereby highlighting its potential for deployment in practical applications. Moreover, on the subject of a tourist route, we qualitatively evaluate explanations generated by our framework. This evaluation not only validates our framework but also shows the synergy between explanation frameworks and LLMs. See https://ntt-dkiku.github.io/xai-vrp for our code, datasets, models, and demo.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_03585
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RouteExplainer: An Explanation Framework for Vehicle Routing Problem
Kikuta, Daisuke
Ikeuchi, Hiroki
Tajiri, Kengo
Nakano, Yuusuke
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Optimization and Control
The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a widely studied combinatorial optimization problem and has been applied to various practical problems. While the explainability for VRP is significant for improving the reliability and interactivity in practical VRP applications, it remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose RouteExplainer, a post-hoc explanation framework that explains the influence of each edge in a generated route. Our framework realizes this by rethinking a route as the sequence of actions and extending counterfactual explanations based on the action influence model to VRP. To enhance the explanation, we additionally propose an edge classifier that infers the intentions of each edge, a loss function to train the edge classifier, and explanation-text generation by Large Language Models (LLMs). We quantitatively evaluate our edge classifier on four different VRPs. The results demonstrate its rapid computation while maintaining reasonable accuracy, thereby highlighting its potential for deployment in practical applications. Moreover, on the subject of a tourist route, we qualitatively evaluate explanations generated by our framework. This evaluation not only validates our framework but also shows the synergy between explanation frameworks and LLMs. See https://ntt-dkiku.github.io/xai-vrp for our code, datasets, models, and demo.
title RouteExplainer: An Explanation Framework for Vehicle Routing Problem
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03585