{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/learning-heuristics-for-transit-network","title":"Learning Heuristics for Transit Network Design and Improvement with Deep Reinforcement Learning","arxiv_id":"2404.05894","date":"2024-04-08","proceeding":null,"authors":["Andrew Holliday","Ahmed El-Geneidy","Gregory Dudek"],"abstract":"Planning a network of public transit routes is a challenging optimization problem. Metaheuristic algorithms search through the space of possible transit networks by applying heuristics that randomly alter routes in a network. The design of these heuristics has a major impact on the quality of the result. In this paper, we use deep reinforcement learning to train a graph neural net to provide heuristics for an evolutionary algorithm. These neural heuristics improve the algorithm's results on benchmark synthetic cities with 70 nodes or more, and achieve new state-of-the-art results on the challenging Mumford benchmark. They also improve upon a simulation of the real transit network in the city of Laval, Canada, by 52% and 25% on two key metrics, and offer cost savings of up to 19% over the city's existing transit network.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05894v5","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.05894v5.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"learning-heuristics-for-transit-network","repo_url":"https://github.com/aholliday/transit_learning","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"deep-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Deep Reinforcement Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}