Learning Heuristics to Solve Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problems Using Large Language Models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Modern logistics companies face significant challenges in efficiently managing dynamic transportation systems, particularly in addressing Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problems (DVRP). These complex problems require specialized expertise for effective algorithm design. Traditional approaches often rely on manual algorithm design for specific routing problems. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods, though capable of learning heuristics for diverse routing problems, suffer from poor training efficiency and weak generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To address these limitations, we leverage the strong generalization capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and adopt an LLM-based heuristic learning approach for DVRP. Our method learns heuristics and autonomously generates executable code within an evolutionary framework, requiring fewer than 10 samples for training. This enables fast training while maintaining robust performance on large-scale OOD instances. Comprehensive experiments across multiple routing problems—including Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP), VRP with Time Windows (VRPTW), DVRP, and DVRP with Time Windows (DVRPTW)—demonstrate that our approach learns effective heuristics and consistently surpasses Greedy baselines. Moreover, in constrained optimization tasks (VRPTW and DVRPTW), our method attains higher feasibility rates than Greedy baselines and approaches the performance of expert-designed heuristics. The proposed method presents a promising and scalable solution with significant potential for real-world industrial deployment.1
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".