Heuristic Sequence Selection for Inventory Routing Problem

In this paper, an improved sequence-based selection hyper-heuristic method for the Air Liquide inventory routing problem, the subject of the ROADEF/EURO 2016 challenge, is described. The organizers of the challenge have proposed a real-world problem of inventory routing as a difficult combinatorial optimization problem. An exact method often fails to find a feasible solution to such problems. On the other hand, heuristics may be able to find a good quality solution that is significantly better than those produced by an expert human planner. There is a growing interest toward self-configuring automated general-purpose reusable heuristic approaches for combinatorial optimization. Hyper-heuristics have emerged as such methodologies. This paper investigates a new breed of hyper-heuristics based on the principles of sequence analysis to solve the inventory routing problem. The primary point of this work is that it shows the usefulness of the improved sequence-based selection hyper-heuristic, and in particular demonstrates the advantages of using a data science technique of hidden Markov model for the heuristic selection.