Neural Bee Colony Optimization: A Case Study in Public Transit Network
  Design
Andrew Holliday Gregory Dudek
In this work we explore the combination of metaheuristics and learned neural
network solvers for combinatorial optimization. We do this in the context of
the transit network design problem, a uniquely challenging combinatorial
optimization problem with real-world importance. We train a neural network
policy to perform single-shot planning of individual transit routes, and then
incorporate it as one of several sub-heuristics in a modified Bee Colony
Optimization (BCO) metaheuristic algorithm. Our experimental results
demonstrate that this hybrid algorithm outperforms the learned policy alone by
up to 20% and the original BCO algorithm by up to 53% on realistic problem
instances. We perform a set of ablations to study the impact of each component
of the modified algorithm.