A Deep Averaged Reinforcement Learning Approach for the Traveling Salesman Problem

This work presents a deep averaged reinforcement-learning approach to learn improvement heuristics for route planning. The proposed method is tested on the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). While learning improvement heuristics using machine learning models are prosperous, these methods suffer from low generalization and forgetfulness of the agents during the training process. We have applied the stochastic weight averaging method during the training phase to solve these issues, which smothers the training convergence and prevents the forgetting of optimized learned policies, and consequently provides better results. The agent can learn the optimized policy while holding a moving average of the previously learned policies during the training epochs. In order to assess the performance of our proposed approach, we conducted comparative experiments considering other known methods from the literature. The results demonstrate our proposed method’s superiority in training trends and optimization.