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. 2023 Sep 29;4(6):100520.
doi: 10.1016/j.xinn.2023.100520. eCollection 2023 Nov 13.

Can language models be used for real-world urban-delivery route optimization?

Affiliations

Can language models be used for real-world urban-delivery route optimization?

Yang Liu et al. Innovation (Camb). .

Abstract

Language models have contributed to breakthroughs in interdisciplinary research, such as protein design and molecular dynamics understanding. In this study, we reveal that beyond language, representations of other entities, such as human behaviors, that are mappable to learnable sequences can be learned by language models. One compelling example is the real-world delivery route optimization problem. We here propose a novel approach based on the language model to optimize delivery routes on the basis of drivers' historical experiences. Although a broad range of optimization-based approaches have been designed to optimize delivery routes, they do not capture the implicit knowledge of complex delivery operating environments. The model we propose integrates this knowledge in the route optimization process by learning from driving behaviors in experienced drivers. A real-world delivery route that preserves drivers' implicit behavioral patterns is first analogized to a sentence in natural language. Through unsupervised learning, we then learn the vector representations of words and infer the drivers' delivery chains on the basis of the tailored chain-reaction-based algorithm. We also provide insights into the fusion of language models and operations research methods. In our approach, language models are applied to learn drivers' delivery behaviors and infer new deliveries at the delivery zone level, while the classic traveling salesman problem (TSP) model is embedded into the hybrid framework for intra-zone optimization. Numerical experiments performed on real-world data from Amazon's delivery service demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms pure optimization, supporting the effectiveness, efficiency, and extensibility of our model. As a versatile approach, the proposed framework can easily be extended to various disciplines in which the data follow certain grammar rules. We anticipate that our work will serve as a stepping stone toward the understanding and application of language models in tackling interdisciplinary research problems.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Flowchart of the learning-based model The proposed model consists of three main steps: (1) representing real-world delivery routes as “delivery behavior sentences,” (2) learning delivery behaviors using a machine learning model, and (3) inferring delivery sequences from word vectors.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Visualization of the neural network and the associated weight matrix (A) Structure of the neural network. (B) Structure of the weight matrix.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Comparison between real-world delivery route and theoretically optimized route (A) A real-world delivery route of Amazon’s delivery service, where each point represents a delivery stop in the route. Stops within the same delivery service zone share the same color. (B) A delivery route optimized by the standard TSP model. (C) Two delivery routes in the same city sharing a common zone subsequence “D-2.1B, D-2.1C, D-2.3C.” (D) A real-world intra-zone delivery route. (E) An optimal intra-zone delivery route. (F) Overview of the real-world delivery route optimization system.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Performance comparison of different models (A) Statistics of samples in the data. (B) Missing rate of zone ID sequences. (C) Scatterplot showcasing sample errors across different methods. (D) Error distribution of our method and the optimization approach. (E) Efficiency metrics of our method and the optimization approach. (F) Error analysis for 15 delivery stations with different model parameters. Here, k represents the range of contextual information, often termed as window size in NLP.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Model performance analysis (A) Prediction error across different delivery stations. (B) Relationship between the number of matched samples and average error. (C) Distribution of individual error values. (D) Relationship between the length of the zone sequence and the average error.

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