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Title: A Scalable Graph Learning Approach to Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem Using Capsule Networks and Attention Mechanism
Abstract

This paper introduces a new graph neural network architecture for learning solutions of Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems (CVRP) as policies over graphs. CVRP serves as an important benchmark for a wide range of combinatorial planning problems, which can be adapted to manufacturing, robotics and fleet planning applications. Here, the specific aim is to demonstrate the significant real-time executability and (beyond training) scalability advantages of the new graph learning approach over existing solution methods. While partly drawing motivation from recent graph learning methods that learn to solve CO problems such as multi-Traveling Salesman Problem (mTSP) and VRP, the proposed neural architecture presents a novel encoder-decoder architecture. Here the encoder is based on Capsule networks, which enables better representation of local and global information with permutation invariant node embeddings; and the decoder is based on the Multi-head attention (MHA) mechanism allowing sequential decisions. This architecture is trained using a policy gradient Reinforcement Learning process. The performance of our approach is favorably compared with state-of-the-art learning and non-learning methods for a benchmark suite of Capacitated-VRP (CVRP) problems. A further study on the CVRP with demand uncertainties is conducted to explore how this Capsule-Attention Mechanism architecture can be extended to handle real-world uncertainties by embedding them through the encoder.

 
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Award ID(s):
2048020
NSF-PAR ID:
10345362
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the ASME 2022 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference. Volume 3B: 48th Design Automation Conference (DAC)
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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We used a variety of techniques such as the file locking mechanism, multithreading, circular buffers, real-time event decoding, and signal-decision plotting to realize the system. A video demonstrating the system is available at: https://www.isip.piconepress.com/projects/nsf_pfi_tt/resources/videos/realtime_eeg_analysis/v2.5.1/video_2.5.1.mp4. The final conference submission will include a more detailed analysis of the online performance of each module. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Research reported in this publication was most recently supported by the National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation award number IIP-1827565 and the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Universal Research Enhancement Program (PA CURE). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official views of any of these organizations. REFERENCES [1] A. Craik, Y. He, and J. L. Contreras-Vidal, “Deep learning for electroencephalogram (EEG) classification tasks: a review,” J. Neural Eng., vol. 16, no. 3, p. 031001, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1088/1741-2552/ab0ab5. [2] A. C. Bridi, T. Q. Louro, and R. C. L. Da Silva, “Clinical Alarms in intensive care: implications of alarm fatigue for the safety of patients,” Rev. Lat. Am. Enfermagem, vol. 22, no. 6, p. 1034, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1590/0104-1169.3488.2513. [3] M. Golmohammadi, V. Shah, I. Obeid, and J. Picone, “Deep Learning Approaches for Automatic Seizure Detection from Scalp Electroencephalograms,” in Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology: Emerging Trends in Research and Applications, 1st ed., I. Obeid, I. Selesnick, and J. Picone, Eds. New York, New York, USA: Springer, 2020, pp. 233–274. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36844-9_8. [4] “CFM Olympic Brainz Monitor.” [Online]. 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New York City, New York, USA: Demos Medical Publishing, 2007. [9] D. P. Bovet and C. Marco, Understanding the Linux Kernel, 3rd ed. O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2005. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/understanding-the-linux/0596005652/. [10] V. Shah et al., “The Temple University Hospital Seizure Detection Corpus,” Front. Neuroinform., vol. 12, pp. 1–6, 2018. https://doi.org/10.3389/fninf.2018.00083. [11] F. Pedregosa et al., “Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python,” J. Mach. Learn. Res., vol. 12, pp. 2825–2830, 2011. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1953048.2078195. [12] J. Gotman, D. Flanagan, J. Zhang, and B. Rosenblatt, “Automatic seizure detection in the newborn: Methods and initial evaluation,” Electroencephalogr. Clin. Neurophysiol., vol. 103, no. 3, pp. 356–362, 1997. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0013-4694(97)00003-9. 
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