Machine learning speeds up vehicle routing
Strategy accelerates the best algorithmic solvers for large sets of cities.
Waiting for a holiday package to be delivered? There’s a tricky math problem that needs to be solved before the delivery truck pulls up to your door, and MIT researchers have a strategy that could speed up the solution.
The approach applies to vehicle routing problems such as last-mile delivery, where the goal is to deliver goods from a central depot to multiple cities while keeping travel costs down. While there are algorithms designed to solve this problem for a few hundred cities, these solutions become too slow when applied to a larger set of cities.
To remedy this, Cathy Wu, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Assistant Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, and her students have come up with a machine-learning strategy that accelerates some of the strongest algorithmic solvers by 10 to 100 times.
The solver algorithms work by breaking up the problem of delivery into smaller subproblems to solve — say, 200 subproblems for routing vehicles between 2,000 cities. Wu and her colleagues augment this process with a new machine-learning algorithm that identifies the most useful subproblems to solve, instead of solving all the subproblems, to increase the quality of the solution while using orders of magnitude less compute.
Their approach, which they call “learning-to-delegate,” can be used across a variety of solvers and a variety of similar problems, including scheduling and pathfinding for warehouse robots, the researchers say.
The work pushes the boundaries on rapidly solving large-scale vehicle routing problems, says Marc Kuo, founder and CEO of Routific, a smart logistics platform for optimizing delivery routes. Some of Routific’s recent algorithmic advances were inspired by Wu’s work, he notes.
“Most of the academic body of research tends to focus on specialized algorithms for small problems, trying to find better solutions at the cost of processing times. But in the real-world, businesses don’t care about finding better solutions, especially if they take too long for compute,” Kuo explains. “In the world of last-mile logistics, time is money, and you cannot have your entire warehouse operations wait for a slow algorithm to return the routes. An algorithm needs to be hyper-fast for it to be practical.”
Wu, social and engineering systems doctoral student Sirui Li, and electrical engineering and computer science doctoral student Zhongxia Yan presented their research this week at the 2021 NeurIPS conference.
