Large Neighborhood Search with Decision Diagrams

Large Neighborhood Search with Decision Diagrams

Xavier Gillard, Pierre Schaus

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4754-4760. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/659

Local search is a popular technique to solve combinatorial optimization problems efficiently. To escape local minima one generally uses metaheuristics or try to design large neighborhoods around the current best solution. A somewhat more black box approach consists in using an optimization solver to explore a large neighborhood. This is the large-neighborhood search (LNS) idea that we reuse in this work. We introduce a generic neighborhood exploration algorithm based on restricted decision diagrams (DD) constructed from the current best solution. We experiment DD-LNS on two sequencing problems: the traveling salesman problem with time windows (TSPTW) and a production planning problem (DLSP). Despite its simplicity, DD-LNS is competitive with the state-of-the-art MIP approach on DLSP. It is able to improve the best known solutions of some standard instances for TSPTW and even to prove the optimality of quite a few other instances.
Keywords:
Search: Combinatorial Search and Optimisation
Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Constraint Optimization
Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Solvers and Tools
Search: Meta-Reasoning and Meta-Heuristics