Emergency Scheduling of Aerial Vehicles via Graph Neural Neighborhood Search

The thriving advances in autonomous vehicles and aviation have enabled the efficient implementation of aerial last-mile delivery services to meet the pressing demand for urgent relief supply distribution. Variable neighborhood search (VNS) is a promising technique for aerial emergency scheduling. However, the existing VNS methods usually exhaustively explore all considered neighborhoods with a prefixed order, leading to an inefficient search process and slow convergence speed. To address this issue, this article proposes a novel graph neural neighborhood search (GENIS) algorithm, which includes an online reinforcement learning (RL) agent that guides the search process by selecting the most appropriate low-level local search operators based on the search state. We develop a dual-graph neural representation learning method to extract comprehensive and informative feature representations from the search state. Besides, we propose a reward-shaping policy learning method to address the decaying reward issue along the search process. Extensive experiments conducted across various benchmark instances demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. Further investigations validate the effectiveness of the newly designed knowledge guidance scheme and the learned feature representations.