RouteFinder: Towards Foundation Models for Vehicle Routing Problems

Understand

This paper introduces RouteFinder, a comprehensive foundation model framework to tackle different Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) variants.

• Our core idea is that a foundation model for VRPs should be able to represent variants by treating each as a subset of a generalized problem equipped with different attributes.
• We propose a unified VRP environment capable of efficiently handling any combination of these attributes.
• The RouteFinder model leverages a modern transformer-based encoder and global attribute embeddings to improve task representation.