Setting the Configuration Parameters of the Algorithm for the Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem by HPC Power

The quality of an optimal solution of the Vehicle Routing Problem is strongly depended on the setting of the configuration parameters of the algorithm. The paper is focused on the introduction of hyperparameter search for solving the Vehicle Routing Problem using a HyperLoom platform for defining and executing scientific pipelines in a distributed environment. To give a concrete example, we focused on Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem for the waste collection. HyperLoom platform was used to define and execute the hyperparameters sweep pipeline. The heuristic algorithm was tested on a real benchmark of the waste collection in Ostrava, Czech Republic. The aim of our case was to effectively combine the minimization of the total travelled distance and the optimization of the fairness of the routes in terms of the standard deviation of a tour length. The waste collection problem was very extensive and computationally demanding, so it was necessary to use high performance computing architecture for testing a large number of different settings of configuration parameters. The experiments were run on the supercomputer Salomon operatedby IT4InnovationsNationalSupercomputingCenterintheCzech Republic.