DeepCO: Offline Combinatorial Optimization Framework Utilizing Deep Learning

Abstract

Combinatorial optimization serves as an essential part in many modern industrial applications. A great number of the problems are offline setting due to safety and/or cost issues. While simulation-based approaches appear difficult to realise for complicated systems, in this research, we propose DeepCO, an offline combinatorial optimization framework utilizing deep learning. We also design an offline variation of Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) to model warehouse operation sequence optimization problem for evaluation. With only limited historical data, novel proposed distribution regularized optimization method outperforms existing baseline method in offline TSP experiment reducing route length by 5.7% averagely and shows great potential in real world problems.