Rolling Horizon based Temporal Decomposition for the Offline Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）；Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority（查塔努加地区区域交通管理局）；Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
Youngseo Kim, Danushka Edirimanna, Michael Wilbur, Philip Pugliese, Aron Laszka, Abhishek Dubey, Samitha Samaranayake
The offline pickup and delivery problem with time windows (PDPTW) is a classical combinatorial optimization problem in the transportation community, which has proven to be very challenging computationally. Due to the complexity of the problem, practical problem instances can be solved only via heuristics, which trade-off solution quality for computational tractability. Among the various heuristics, a common strategy is problem decomposition, that is, the reduction of a large-scale problem into a collection of smaller sub-problems, with spatial and temporal decompositions being two natural approaches. While spatial decomposition has been successful in certain settings, effective temporal decomposition has been challenging due to the difficulty of stitching together the sub-problem solutions across the decomposition boundaries. In this work, we introduce a novel temporal decomposition scheme for solving a class of PDPTWs that have narrow time windows, for which it is able to provide both fast and high-quality solutions. We utilize techniques that have been popularized recently in the context of online dial-a-ride problems along with the general idea of rolling horizon optimization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to solve offline PDPTWs using such an approach. To show the performance and scalability of our framework, we use the optimization of paratransit services as a motivating example. We compare our results with an offline heuristic algorithm using Google OR-Tools. In smaller problem instances, the baseline approach is as competitive as our framework. However, in larger problem instances, our framework is more scalable and can provide good solutions to problem instances of varying degrees of difficulty, while the baseline algorithm often fails to find a feasible solution within comparable compute times.
The Dynamic Pickup and Delivery Problem (DPDP) is an essential problem within the logistics domain. So far, research on this problem has mainly focused on using artificial data which fails to reflect the complexity of real-world problems. In this draft, we would like to introduce a new benchmark from real business scenarios as well as a simulator supporting the dynamic evaluation. The benchmark and simulator have been published and successfully supported the ICAPS 2021 Dynamic Pickup and Delivery Problem competition participated by 152 teams.
The multi-agent pickup and delivery (MAPD) problem, in which multiple agents iteratively carry materials without collisions, has received significant attention. However, many conventional MAPD algorithms assume a specifically designed grid-like environment, such as an automated warehouse. Therefore, they have many pickup and delivery locations where agents can stay for a lengthy period, as well as plentiful detours to avoid collisions owing to the freedom of movement in a grid. By contrast, because a maze-like environment such as a search-and-rescue or construction site has fewer pickup/delive…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
The multi-agent path-finding (MAPF) problem has recently received a lot of attention. However, it does not capture important characteristics of many real-world domains, such as automated warehouses, where agents are constantly engaged with new tasks. In this paper, we therefore study a lifelong version of the MAPF problem, called the multi-agent pickup and delivery (MAPD) problem. In the MAPD problem, agents have to attend to a stream of delivery tasks in an online setting. One agent has to be assigned to each delivery task. This agent has to first move to a given pickup location and then to a…
This paper proposes a control method for the multi-agent pickup and delivery problem (MAPD problem) by extending the priority inheritance with backtracking (PIBT) method to make it applicable to more general environments. PIBT is an effective algorithm that introduces a priority to each agent, and at each timestep, the agents, in descending order of priority, decide their next neighboring locations in the next timestep through communications only with the local agents. Unfortunately, PIBT is only applicable to environments that are modeled as a bi-connected area, and if it contains dead-ends, …
Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
In this work, we consider the Multi-Agent Pickup-and-Delivery (MAPD) problem, where agents constantly engage with new tasks and need to plan collision-free paths to execute them. To execute a task, an agent needs to visit a pair of goal locations, consisting of a pickup location and a delivery location. We propose two variants of an algorithm that assigns a sequence of tasks to each agent using the anytime algorithm Large Neighborhood Search (LNS) and plans paths using the Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) algorithm Priority-Based Search (PBS). LNS-PBS is complete for well-formed MAPD instances,…
Learning to Estimate Package Delivery Time in Mixed Imbalanced Delivery and Pickup Logistics Services
Department of Electronic Engineering, BNRist, Tsinghua University & JD Logistics（电子工程系、BNRist、清华大学及京东物流）；Department of Electronic Engineering, BNRist, Tsinghua University（电子工程系、BNRist、清华大学）；JD Logistics（京东物流）
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局制造技术研究所）；Institute of Marine Science and Technology, Shandong University（山东大学海洋科学与技术学院）；Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）
We present an efficient Neural Neighborhood Search (N2S) approach for pickup and delivery problems (PDPs). In specific, we design a powerful Synthesis Attention that allows the vanilla self-attention to synthesize various types of features regarding a route solution. We also exploit two customized decoders that automatically learn to perform removal and reinsertion of a pickup-delivery node pair to tackle the precedence constraint. Additionally, a diversity enhancement scheme is leveraged to further ameliorate the performance. Our N2S is generic, and extensive experiments on two canonical PDP …
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech)（新加坡制造技术研究院）
Recently, a higher competition in logistics business introduces new challenges to the vehicle routing problem (VRP). Re-route planning, also known as dynamic VRP, is one of the important challenges. The re-route planning has to be performed when new customers request for deliveries while the delivery vehicles, i.e., trucks, are serving other customers. While the re-route planning has been studied in the literature, most of the existing works do not consider different uncertainties. Therefore, in this paper, we propose two systems, i.e., (i) an offline package pickup and delivery planning with …
Instituto de Computação – Universidade Federal Fluminense（联邦弗卢米嫩塞大学计算机学院）；Departamento de Engenharia Industrial – Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro（天主教里约热内卢大学工业工程系）；Departamento de Informática – Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro（天主教里约热内卢大学计算机系）；Departamento de Computação – Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto（联邦乌贝兰迪亚大学计算机系）；Department of Business Administration – Universität Wien（维也纳大学工商管理系）
We consider the multi-vehicle one-to-one pickup and delivery problem with split loads, a NP-hard problem linked with a variety of applications for bulk product transportation, bike-sharing systems and inventory re-balancing. This problem is notoriously difficult due to the interaction of two challenging vehicle routing attributes, "pickups and deliveries" and "split deliveries". This possibly leads to optimal solutions of a size that grows exponentially with the instance size, containing multiple visits per customer pair, even in the same route. To solve this problem, we propose an iterated lo…
The Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery (MAPD) problem models applications where a large number of agents attend to a stream of incoming pickup-and-delivery tasks. Token Passing (TP) is a recent MAPD algorithm that is efficient and effective. We make TP even more efficient and effective by using a novel combinatorial search algorithm, called Safe Interval Path Planning with Reservation Table (SIPPwRT), for single-agent path planning. SIPPwRT uses an advanced data structure that allows for fast updates and lookups of the current paths of all agents in an online setting. The resulting MAPD algorithm…
MIRA Lab, USTC（中国科学技术大学MIRA实验室）；Noah’s Ark Lab, Huawei（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
The Dynamic Pickup and Delivery Problem (DPDP) is aimed at dynamically scheduling vehicles among multiple sites in order to minimize the cost when delivery orders are not known a priori. Although DPDP plays an important role in modern logistics and supply chain management, state-of-the-art DPDP algorithms are still limited on their solution quality and efficiency. In practice, they fail to provide a scalable solution as the numbers of vehicles and sites become large. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach, Spatial-Temporal Aided Double Deep Graph Network (ST-DDGN), to solve industry-…
Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto（欧鲁普雷图联邦大学）；Universidade Federal de Viçosa（维索萨联邦大学）；Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia（摩德纳和雷焦艾米利亚大学）
In this paper, we introduce the Double Traveling Salesman Problem with Partial Last-In-First-Out Loading Constraints (DTSPPL). It is a pickup-and-delivery single-vehicle routing problem, where all pickup operations must be performed before any delivery one because the pickup and delivery areas are geographically separated. The vehicle collects items in the pickup area and loads them into its container, a horizontal stack. After performing all pickup operations, the vehicle begins delivering the items in the delivery area. Loading and unloading operations must obey a partial Last-In-First-Out (…
SNCF, the French public train company, is experimenting to develop new types of transportation services by tackling vehicle routing problems. While many deep learning models have been used to tackle efficiently vehicle routing problems, it is difficult to take into account time related constraints. In this paper, we solve the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (CVRPTW) and the Capacitated Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows (CPDPTW) with a constructive iterative Deep Learning algorithm. We use an Attention Encoder-Decoder structure and design a novel insertion heur…
This paper investigates the problem of assigning shipping requests to ad hoc couriers in the context of crowdsourced urban delivery. The shipping requests are spatially distributed each with a limited time window between the earliest time for pickup and latest time for delivery. The ad hoc couriers, termed crowdsourcees, also have limited time availability and carrying capacity. We propose a new deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach to tackling this assignment problem. A deep Q network (DQN) algorithm is trained which entails two salient features of experience replay and target netw…
