Scaling Combinatorial Optimization Neural Improvement Heuristics with Online Search and Adaptation

This approach (Singh and Rizwanullah 2022) to circuit board design eliminates the necessity for manually crafted components, (Barahona et al. 1988) and phylogenetics (Catanzaro thereby providing an ideal means to address problems without et al. 2012). Although general-purpose solvers exist and requiring specific domain knowledge (Lombardi and Milano most CO problems are easy to formulate, in many applications 2018). However, improvement heuristics can be easier of interest getting to the exact optimal solution is NPhard to apply when complex constraints need to be satisfied and and said solvers are extremely inefficient or even impractical may yield better performance than constructive alternatives due to the computational time required to reach optimality when the problem structure is difficult to represent (Zhang (Toth 2000; Colorni et al. 1996). Specialized solvers et al. 2020) or when known improvement operators with and heuristics have been developed over the years for different good properties exist (Bordewich et al. 2008).