Neural Deconstruction Search for Vehicle Routing Problems

Autoregressive construction approaches generate solutions to vehicle routing problems in a step-by-step fashion, leading to high-quality solutions that are nearing the performance achieved by handcrafted, operations research techniques. In this work, we challenge the conventional paradigm of sequential solution construction and introduce an iterative search framework where solutions are instead deconstructed by a neural policy. Throughout the search, the neural policy collaborates with a simple greedy insertion algorithm to rebuild the deconstructed solutions. Our approach surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art operations research methods across three challenging vehicle routing problems of various problem sizes.