用大模型让运筹优化自动建模、辅助求解,提升效率与可扩展性。
Large Language Models in Operations Research: Methods, Applications, and Challenges
- 将自然语言问题转化为数学模型或代码,实现自动建模
- 支持启发式生成与算法演化,提升复杂问题求解能力
- 适合想用AI加速运筹决策的研究者与工业界用户
运筹学(OR)是支撑复杂系统决策的核心方法,广泛应用于交通、供应链管理和生产调度等领域。然而,传统依赖专家建模和手动调参的方法在大规模、动态及多约束问题上常面临可扩展性差与实时性不足的挑战。大语言模型(LLMs)凭借语义理解、结构化生成和推理控制能力,为突破这些瓶颈提供了新路径:可将自然语言描述转化为数学模型或可执行代码,生成启发式策略,演化优化算法,并直接求解优化任务,推动从人工主导向人机智能协作的范式转变。本文系统综述了LLMs在运筹学中的应用进展,将现有方法分为三类:自动建模、辅助优化和直接求解;分析了评估基准与领域应用,并指出关键挑战:语义到结构映射不稳定、研究碎片化、泛化与可解释性不足、评估体系不健全及工业部署障碍。最后提出潜在研究方向。总体而言,LLMs展现出重塑运筹学范式的潜力,有望提升可解释性、适应性与可扩展性,助力下一代智能优化系统发展。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Operations research (OR) is a core methodology that supports complex system decision-making, with broad applications in transportation, supply chain management, and production scheduling. However, traditional approaches that rely on expert-driven modeling and manual parameter tuning often struggle with large-scale, dynamic, and multi-constraint problems, limiting scalability and real-time applicability. Large language models (LLMs), with capabilities in semantic understanding, structured generation, and reasoning control, offer new opportunities to overcome these challenges. They can translate natural language problem descriptions into mathematical models or executable code, generate heuristics, evolve algorithms, and directly solve optimization tasks. This shifts the paradigm from human-driven processes to intelligent human-AI collaboration. This paper systematically reviews progress in applying LLMs to OR, categorizing existing methods into three pathways: automatic modeling, auxiliary optimization, and direct solving. It also examines evaluation benchmarks and domain-specific applications, and highlights key challenges, including unstable semantic-to-structure mapping, fragmented research, limited generalization and interpretability, insufficient evaluation systems, and barriers to industrial deployment. Finally, it outlines potential research directions. Overall, LLMs demonstrate strong potential to reshape the OR paradigm by enhancing interpretability, adaptability, and scalability, paving the way for next-generation intelligent optimization systems.
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