Graph Edit Distance Formulation for the Vehicle Routing Problem: Theory and Analysis
Researchers have reformulated the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) as a Graph Edit Distance (GED) maximization problem. This new approach models VRP at the edge level, allowing for deeper structural analysis of solutions and providing a natural per-edge supervision signal for future graph neural network applications. Analysis of benchmark instances revealed that optimal routing graphs utilize a small percentage of available edges, and a portion of these optimal edges are consistently missed by common heuristics. AI
IMPACT Introduces a new theoretical framework for VRP that could inform future graph neural network approaches to optimization problems.