Machine Learning + Operations Research

Abstract

Where does Machine Learning (ML) meet Operations Research (OR)? I will discuss some interesting ideas on the scale from ‘classic’ OR/human designed algorithms to data/ML driven approaches to solving optimization problems. I will then dive into our recently developed method, which is at one end of the scale and uses a graph neural network and reinforcement learning to learn from scratch a policy that constructs solutions to routing problems such as the TSP.