用多智能体协作优化路径搜索,显著提升大规模路由问题求解效率
COAgents: Multi-Agent Framework to Learn and Navigate Routing Problems Search Space

- 将搜索过程建模为动态图,分三类智能体协同决策
- 在VRPTW上比最强神经求解器减少44%差距(N=50)
- 适合需要高效求解复杂路径问题的研究与工业应用
尽管车辆路径问题(VRP)在众多现实系统中至关重要,但其组合复杂性使其在大规模下仍难以求解。传统启发式方法依赖人工设计规则进行局部优化和偶尔的跳跃以跳出局部最优,但泛化能力差。本文提出COAgents,一种合作多智能体框架,将搜索过程建模为图:节点代表解,边对应局部优化或大范围扰动(跳跃)。搜索过程中动态构建部分搜索图(PSG),训练节点选择、移动选择和跳跃三个智能体,分别引导强化搜索与适时探索新区域。不同于端到端学习,该框架清晰分离通用搜索控制与紧凑领域编码,具备跨任务适应性。在CVRP和VRPTW基准上的大量实验表明,COAgents在CVRP上保持竞争力,在更困难的VRPTW上达到学习方法新纪录,相比最强神经求解器(POMO)在N=100时减少14%差距、在N=50时减少44%;相比ALNS分别减少21%和40%。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Although Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) are essential to many real-world systems, they remain computationally intractable at scale due to their combinatorial complexity. Traditional heuristics rely on handcrafted rules for local improvements and occasional \textit{jumps} to escape local minima, but often struggle to generalize across diverse instances. We introduce \textbf{COAgents}, a cooperative multi-agent framework that models the search process as a graph: nodes represent solutions, and edges correspond to either local refinements or large perturbations for diversification (i.e., jumps). A \textit{Partial Search Graph} (PSG) is dynamically constructed during search, enabling COAgents to train a Node Selection Agent and a Move Selection Agent to guide intensification, and a Jump Agent to trigger well-timed explorations of new regions. Unlike end-to-end learning approaches, COAgents cleanly separates problem-agnostic search control from compact domain-specific encoding, facilitating adaptability across tasks. Extensive experiments on the CVRP and VRPTW benchmarks show that COAgents remains competitive with several learn-to-search baselines on CVRP and sets a new state of the art among learning-based methods on the more challenging VRPTW instances, reducing the gap to the best-known solutions by 14\% at $N\!=\!100$ and 44\% at $N\!=\!50$ relative to the strongest neural solver (POMO), and by 21\% and 40\% respectively relative to ALNS. Code is available at https://github.com/mahdims/COAgents.
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