An Overview and Experimental Study of Learning-based Optimization Algorithms for Vehicle Routing Problem

Vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a typical discrete combinatorial optimization problem, and many models and algorithms have been proposed to solve VRP and variants. Although existing approaches has contributed a lot to the development of this field, these approaches either are limited in problem size or need manual intervening in choosing parameters. To tackle these difficulties, many studies consider learning-based optimization algorithms to solve VRP. This paper reviews recent advances in this field and divides relevant approaches into end-to-end approaches and step-by-step approaches. We design three part experiments to justly evaluate performance of four representative learning-based optimization algorithms and conclude that combining heuristic search can effectively improve learning ability and sampled efficiency of LBO models. Finally we point out that research trend of LBO algorithms is to solve large-scale and multiple constraints problems from real world.