Wouter Kool, ORTEC

Abstract

Join me on a tour! Our first stop is 'learning to solve routing problems', where I'll give a sneak peak into my PhD research on solving vehicle routing problems using deep (reinforcement) learning. I'll then take you along our path to winning the DIMACS challenge VRPTW track. Next, we'll continue our journey towards organizing the EURO Meets NeurIPS vehicle routing competition (challenge): we'll discuss the lessons learned along the way, and the many interesting findings at our destination (all credits to the participants!). I'll show how, along the way, the Hybrid Genetic Search (HGS) algorithm by Thibaut gradually evolved into PyVRP, a high-performance, yet flexible VRP solver using Python with C++ components. Finally, I'll discuss some of the challenges of solving vehicle routing problems in practice.

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