Deep Reinforcement Learning solution for pickup and delivery routing problems with time window and capacity constraints

The task of constructing vehicles optimal routes for pickup and delivery of goods is one of most promising tasks in the context of global urban population growth. Although this kind of problems with small size can be solved by various classical approaches, a fast (or realtime) route optimizer under the constraints of the real world (such as capacity and time windows constraints) for medium-large size problems still remains a highly challenging task. In this work we, for the first time, successfully applied a deep Reinforcing Learning approach (modified JAMPR model) to solve Pickup and Delivery problem with Capacity and Time Window constraints (CPDPTW). We obtained a robust model that gives a fast optimal solution for problems of small and medium size, and gives fast suboptimal solution for problems of larger (> 200) size.

Integrated Order Dispatching and Routing for Last-Mile Pickup via Deep Reinforcement Learning

In recent years, the growing complexity of last-mile pickup operations has increased the need for fast and accurate decision-making on logistics platforms. This challenge is fundamentally driven by two key and tightly coupled decision-making processes: order dispatching and routing. Solving them separately overlooks their interdependence, while fully end-to-end learning can be unstable and costly on large, variable-scale instances due to sparse rewards. To solve this problem, we propose an integrated optimization framework which couples a learned routing oracle with real-time dispatching heuristics. For the routing subproblem, we develop a Dynamic-Residual Graph Attention Network encoder with a Look-Ahead Courier-Personalized decoder. For the dispatching subproblem, we develop a routing-oracle-guided dispatching heuristic with local search, where the oracle provides near-optimal solutions to select candidate couriers while retaining real-time scalability. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets from Cainiao Logistics are used to test the performance of our approach, including an offline evaluation and an online rolling-horizon simulation. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms other benchmarks regarding solution quality and solving time, indicating it can effectively support logistics companies in solving real-time and large-scale last-mile pickup problems.

Middle-mile logistics through the lens of goal-conditioned reinforcement learning

Middle-mile logistics describes the problem of routing parcels through a network of hubs linked by trucks with finite capacity. We rephrase this as a multi-object goal-conditioned MDP. Our method combines graph neural networks with model-free RL, extracting small feature graphs from the environment state.