CAMO: A Conditional Neural Solver for the Multi-objective Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem
Organizations: National University of Singapore, Singapore. · China Unicom Shenzhen Branch, Shenzhen, China. · Central South University, Changsha, China.
Abstract
Robotic systems often require a team of robots to collectively visit multiple targets while optimizing competing objectives, such as total travel cost and makespan. This setting can be formulated as the Multi-Objective Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem (MOMTSP). Although learning-based methods have shown strong performance on the single-agent TSP and multi-objective TSP variants, they rarely address the combined challenges of multi-agent coordination and multi-objective trade-offs, which introduce dual sources of complexity. To bridge this gap, we propose CAMO, a conditional neural solver for MOMTSP that generalizes across varying numbers of targets, agents, and preference vectors, and yields high-quality approximations to the Pareto front (PF). Specifically, CAMO consists of a conditional encoder to fuse preferences into instance representations, enabling explicit control over multi-objective trade-offs, and a collaborative decoder that coordinates all agents by alternating agent selection and node selection to construct multi-agent tours autoregressively. To further improve generalization, we train CAMO with a REINFORCE-based objective over a mixed distribution of problem sizes. Extensive experiments show that CAMO outperforms both neural and conventional heuristics, achieving a closer approximation of PFs. In addition, ablation results validate the contributions of CAMO's key components, and real-world tests on a mobile robot platform demonstrate its practical applicability.
Figures & tables
| Method | N20A2 | N50A3 | N100A4 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HV | Gap | Time | HV | Gap | Time | HV | Gap | Time | |
| MOEA/D | 0.201 | 16.71% | 32.92m | 0.374 | 15.75% | 2.58h | 0.394 | 37.33% | 4.56h |
| MOGLS | 0.214 | 11.57% | 7.72h | 0.207 | 53.38% | 19.88h | 0.227 | 63.85% | 38.43h |
| NSGA-II | 0.236 | 2.48% | 34.89m | 0.389 | 12.39% | 2.47h | 0.416 | 33.76% | 4.28h |
| NSGA-III | 0.235 | 3.06% | 45.37m | 0.386 | 13.18% | 2.50h | 0.402 | 35.94% | 4.34h |
| MO-PARCO | 0.229 | 5.46% | 1.53m | 0.422 | 4.96% | 2.56m | 0.591 | 5.95% | 3.22m |
| Method | N100A6 | N150A4 | N150A6 | N200A4 | N200A6 | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HV | Gap | Time | HV | Gap | Time | HV | Gap | Time | HV | Gap | Time | HV | Gap | Time | |
| MOEA/D | 0.536 | 24.36% | 4.51h | 0.348 | 50.41% | 5.83h | 0.426 | 41.54% | 5.97h | 0.265 | 64.02% | 7.26h | 0.342 | 54.82% | 7.47h |
| MOGLS | 0.393 | 44.49% | 50.96h | 0.214 | 69.47% | 52.39h | 0.289 | 60.36% | 67.88h | 0.186 | 74.80% | 65.65h | 0.243 | 67.86% | 81.76h |
| NSGA-II | 0.528 | 25.42% | 4.45h | 0.379 | 45.93% | 5.91h | 0.416 | 42.94% | 5.94h | 0.327 | 55.69% | 7.53h | 0.348 | 53.97% | 7.75h |
| NSGA-III | 0.518 | 26.84% | 4.51h | 0.356 | 49.17% | 5.97h | 0.396 | 45.75% | 6.29h | 0.288 | 61.04% | 7.61h | 0.315 | 58.37% | 7.82h |
| MO-PARCO | 0.669 | 5.47% | 3.46m | 0.664 | 5.22% | 4.95m | 0.699 | 4.05% | 5.49m | 0.682 | 7.55% | 6.35m | 0.720 | 4.71% | 7.23m |
| Instance | Obj.Sum | Obj.Max | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NSGA-II | CAMO | NSGA-II | CAMO | |
| ulysses22-A2 | 4.00 | 3.95 | 2.28 | 2.33 |
| swiss42-A2 | 5.61 | 5.14 | 3.11 | 2.84 |
| gr21-A3 | 3.78 | 3.78 | 2.01 | 2.08 |
| berlin52-A4 | 6.14 | 5.54 | 2.06 | 1.82 |
| att48-A5 | 5.84 | 5.48 | 1.91 | 1.93 |
| Method | Training Time | HV | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| N50A3 | N100A4 | N200A4 | ||
| CAMO (N100A4) | 168.62 h | 0.4308 | 0.6263 | 0.7339 |
| CAMO | 70.42 h | 0.4394 | 0.6241 | 0.7340 |
Neural Combinatorial Optimization
Neural combinatorial optimization uses neural networks to find high-quality solutions to discrete problems such as routing, scheduling, and graph partitioning.
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