Deep Learning for Data-Driven Districting-and-Routing

Districting-and-routing is a strategic problem aiming to aggregate basic geographical units (e.g., zip codes) into delivery districts. Its goal is to minimize the expected long-term routing cost of performing deliveries in each district separately. Solving this stochastic problem poses critical challenges because repeatedly evaluating routing costs on a set of scenarios while searching for optimal districts takes considerable time. Consequently, solution approaches usually replace the true cost estimation with continuous cost approximation formulas extending the work of Beardwood-Halton-Hammersley and Daganzo. These formulas commit errors that can be magnified during the optimization step. To reconcile speed and solution quality, we introduce a supervised learning and optimization methodology leveraging a graph neural network for delivery cost estimation. This network is trained to imitate known costs generated on a limited subset of training districts. It is used within an iterated local search procedure to produce high-quality districting plans. Our computational experiments, conducted on five metropolitan areas in the United Kingdom, demonstrate that the graph neural network predicts long-term district cost operations more accurately and that optimizing over this oracle permits large economic gains (10.12% on average) over baseline methods that use continuous approximation formulas or shallow neural networks. Finally, we observe that having compact districts alone does not guarantee high-quality solutions and that other learnable geometrical features of the districts play an essential role.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2024.0581.