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Poster

DistrictNet: Decision-aware learning for geographical districting

Cheikh Ahmed · Alexandre Forel · Axel Parmentier · Thibaut Vidal

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Fri 13 Dec 4:30 p.m. PST — 7:30 p.m. PST

Abstract:

Districting is a complex combinatorial problem that consists in partitioning a geographical area into small districts. In logistics, it is a major strategic decision determining operating costs for several years. Solving them using traditional methods is intractable even for small geographical areas and existing heuristics, while quick, often provide sub-optimal results. We present a structured learning approach to find high-quality solutions to real-world districting problems in a few minutes. It is based on integrating a combinatorial optimization layer, the capacitated minimum spanning tree problem, into a graph neural network architecture. To train this pipeline in a decision-aware fashion, we show how to construct target solutions embedded in a suitable space and learn from target solutions. Experiments show that our approach outperforms existing methods as it reduces costs by 10% on average on real-world cities.

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