A Privacy-Preserving Service Framework for Traveling Salesman Problem-Based Neural Combinatorial Optimization Network

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is one of the classic combinatorial optimization problems, which can be widely used in intelligent transportation and logistics field. Neural network has shown great potential in combinatorial optimization tasks. However, it faces privacy leakage when a TSP neural combinatorial optimization network and user's data are directly outsourced to a cloud platform to provide and request service. In order to address the issue, this article proposes a privacy-preserving service framework for a TSP-based neural combinatorial optimization network called PPSF. We first protect the service provider's model parameters and users’ data by different split methods in multiple cloud servers, providing a secure outsourced mode for the participators in the PPSF framework. Then, in the secure outsourced mode, a series of secure computation protocols are designed for the cloud servers to support performing the secure computing in each service task. Moreover, it can also protect the process that the cloud servers respond to users after data processing and achieve private service result recovery. Finally, we prove that the proposed framework can realize privacy protection for TSP-based combinatorial optimization service and verify its utility and efficiency by experiments.