Rethinking Neural Combinatorial Optimization for Vehicle Routing Problems with Different Constraint Tightness Degrees

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Luo, Fu, Wu, Yaoxin, Zheng, Zhi, Wang, Zhenkun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Luo, Fu
Wu, Yaoxin
Zheng, Zhi
Wang, Zhenkun
author_facet Luo, Fu
Wu, Yaoxin
Zheng, Zhi
Wang, Zhenkun
contents Recent neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) methods have shown promising problem-solving ability without requiring domain-specific expertise. Most existing NCO methods use training and testing data with a fixed constraint value and lack research on the effect of constraint tightness on the performance of NCO methods. This paper takes the capacity-constrained vehicle routing problem (CVRP) as an example to empirically analyze the NCO performance under different tightness degrees of the capacity constraint. Our analysis reveals that existing NCO methods overfit the capacity constraint, and they can only perform satisfactorily on a small range of the constraint values but poorly on other values. To tackle this drawback of existing NCO methods, we develop an efficient training scheme that explicitly considers varying degrees of constraint tightness and proposes a multi-expert module to learn a generally adaptable solving strategy. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively overcome the overfitting issue, demonstrating superior performances on the CVRP and CVRP with time windows (CVRPTW) with various constraint tightness degrees.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_24627
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rethinking Neural Combinatorial Optimization for Vehicle Routing Problems with Different Constraint Tightness Degrees
Luo, Fu
Wu, Yaoxin
Zheng, Zhi
Wang, Zhenkun
Machine Learning
Recent neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) methods have shown promising problem-solving ability without requiring domain-specific expertise. Most existing NCO methods use training and testing data with a fixed constraint value and lack research on the effect of constraint tightness on the performance of NCO methods. This paper takes the capacity-constrained vehicle routing problem (CVRP) as an example to empirically analyze the NCO performance under different tightness degrees of the capacity constraint. Our analysis reveals that existing NCO methods overfit the capacity constraint, and they can only perform satisfactorily on a small range of the constraint values but poorly on other values. To tackle this drawback of existing NCO methods, we develop an efficient training scheme that explicitly considers varying degrees of constraint tightness and proposes a multi-expert module to learn a generally adaptable solving strategy. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively overcome the overfitting issue, demonstrating superior performances on the CVRP and CVRP with time windows (CVRPTW) with various constraint tightness degrees.
title Rethinking Neural Combinatorial Optimization for Vehicle Routing Problems with Different Constraint Tightness Degrees
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24627