Learning-Assisted Multi-Operator Variable Neighborhood Search for Urban Cable Routing

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Wei, Zhang, Tao, Lin, Chenhui, Li, Kaiwen, Wang, Rui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912782641790976
author Liu, Wei
Zhang, Tao
Lin, Chenhui
Li, Kaiwen
Wang, Rui
author_facet Liu, Wei
Zhang, Tao
Lin, Chenhui
Li, Kaiwen
Wang, Rui
contents Urban underground cable construction is essential for enhancing the reliability of city power grids, yet its high construction costs make planning a worthwhile optimization task. In urban environments, road layouts tightly constrain cable routing. This, on the one hand, renders relation-only models (i.e., those without explicit routes) used in prior work overly simplistic, and on the other hand, dramatically enlarges the combinatorial search space, thereby imposing much higher demands on algorithm design. In this study, we formulate urban cable routing as a connectivity-path co-optimization problem and propose a learning-assisted multi-operator variable neighborhood search (L-MVNS) algorithm. The framework first introduces an auxiliary task to generate high-quality feasible initial solutions. A hybrid genetic search (HGS) and A* serve as the connectivity optimizer and the route-planning optimizer, respectively. Building on these, a multi-operator variable neighborhood search (MVNS) iteratively co-optimizes inter-substation connectivity and detailed routes via three complementary destruction operators, a modified A* repair operator, and an adaptive neighborhood-sizing mechanism. A multi-agent deep reinforcement learning module is further embedded to prioritize promising neighborhoods. We also construct a standardized and scalable benchmark suite for evaluation. Across these cases, comprehensive experiments demonstrate effectiveness and stability: relative to representative approaches, MVNS and L-MVNS reduce total construction cost by approximately 30-50%, with L-MVNS delivering additional gains on larger instances and consistently higher stability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_19321
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning-Assisted Multi-Operator Variable Neighborhood Search for Urban Cable Routing
Liu, Wei
Zhang, Tao
Lin, Chenhui
Li, Kaiwen
Wang, Rui
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Urban underground cable construction is essential for enhancing the reliability of city power grids, yet its high construction costs make planning a worthwhile optimization task. In urban environments, road layouts tightly constrain cable routing. This, on the one hand, renders relation-only models (i.e., those without explicit routes) used in prior work overly simplistic, and on the other hand, dramatically enlarges the combinatorial search space, thereby imposing much higher demands on algorithm design. In this study, we formulate urban cable routing as a connectivity-path co-optimization problem and propose a learning-assisted multi-operator variable neighborhood search (L-MVNS) algorithm. The framework first introduces an auxiliary task to generate high-quality feasible initial solutions. A hybrid genetic search (HGS) and A* serve as the connectivity optimizer and the route-planning optimizer, respectively. Building on these, a multi-operator variable neighborhood search (MVNS) iteratively co-optimizes inter-substation connectivity and detailed routes via three complementary destruction operators, a modified A* repair operator, and an adaptive neighborhood-sizing mechanism. A multi-agent deep reinforcement learning module is further embedded to prioritize promising neighborhoods. We also construct a standardized and scalable benchmark suite for evaluation. Across these cases, comprehensive experiments demonstrate effectiveness and stability: relative to representative approaches, MVNS and L-MVNS reduce total construction cost by approximately 30-50%, with L-MVNS delivering additional gains on larger instances and consistently higher stability.
title Learning-Assisted Multi-Operator Variable Neighborhood Search for Urban Cable Routing
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19321