Liner Shipping Network Design with Reinforcement Learning
This addresses a combinatorial optimization problem in maritime logistics, offering an incremental improvement over traditional methods like heuristics and large neighborhood search.
The paper tackles the Liner Shipping Network Design Problem (LSNDP) by proposing a reinforcement learning framework integrated with a heuristic solver, achieving competitive results on the LINERLIB benchmark and demonstrating generalization to perturbed instances.
This paper proposes a novel reinforcement learning framework to address the Liner Shipping Network Design Problem (LSNDP), a challenging combinatorial optimization problem focused on designing cost-efficient maritime shipping routes. Traditional methods for solving the LSNDP typically involve decomposing the problem into sub-problems, such as network design and multi-commodity flow, which are then tackled using approximate heuristics or large neighborhood search (LNS) techniques. In contrast, our approach employs a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm on the network design, integrated with a heuristic-based multi-commodity flow solver, to produce competitive results on the publicly available LINERLIB benchmark. Additionally, our method also demonstrates generalization capabilities by producing competitive solutions on the benchmark instances after training on perturbed instances.