Looking Ahead to Avoid Being Late: Solving Hard-Constrained Traveling Salesman Problem

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Chen, Jingxiao, Gong, Ziqin, Liu, Minghuan, Wang, Jun, Yu, Yong, Zhang, Weinan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Chen, Jingxiao
Gong, Ziqin
Liu, Minghuan
Wang, Jun
Yu, Yong
Zhang, Weinan
author_facet Chen, Jingxiao
Gong, Ziqin
Liu, Minghuan
Wang, Jun
Yu, Yong
Zhang, Weinan
contents Many real-world problems can be formulated as a constrained Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). However, the constraints are always complex and numerous, making the TSPs challenging to solve. When the number of complicated constraints grows, it is time-consuming for traditional heuristic algorithms to avoid illegitimate outcomes. Learning-based methods provide an alternative to solve TSPs in a soft manner, which also supports GPU acceleration to generate solutions quickly. Nevertheless, the soft manner inevitably results in difficulty solving hard-constrained problems with learning algorithms, and the conflicts between legality and optimality may substantially affect the optimality of the solution. To overcome this problem and to have an effective solution against hard constraints, we proposed a novel learning-based method that uses looking-ahead information as the feature to improve the legality of TSP with Time Windows (TSPTW) solutions. Besides, we constructed TSPTW datasets with hard constraints in order to accurately evaluate and benchmark the statistical performance of various approaches, which can serve the community for future research. With comprehensive experiments on diverse datasets, MUSLA outperforms existing baselines and shows generalizability potential.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_05318
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Looking Ahead to Avoid Being Late: Solving Hard-Constrained Traveling Salesman Problem
Chen, Jingxiao
Gong, Ziqin
Liu, Minghuan
Wang, Jun
Yu, Yong
Zhang, Weinan
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Many real-world problems can be formulated as a constrained Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). However, the constraints are always complex and numerous, making the TSPs challenging to solve. When the number of complicated constraints grows, it is time-consuming for traditional heuristic algorithms to avoid illegitimate outcomes. Learning-based methods provide an alternative to solve TSPs in a soft manner, which also supports GPU acceleration to generate solutions quickly. Nevertheless, the soft manner inevitably results in difficulty solving hard-constrained problems with learning algorithms, and the conflicts between legality and optimality may substantially affect the optimality of the solution. To overcome this problem and to have an effective solution against hard constraints, we proposed a novel learning-based method that uses looking-ahead information as the feature to improve the legality of TSP with Time Windows (TSPTW) solutions. Besides, we constructed TSPTW datasets with hard constraints in order to accurately evaluate and benchmark the statistical performance of various approaches, which can serve the community for future research. With comprehensive experiments on diverse datasets, MUSLA outperforms existing baselines and shows generalizability potential.
title Looking Ahead to Avoid Being Late: Solving Hard-Constrained Traveling Salesman Problem
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05318