Interpretability of rectangle packing solutions with Monte Carlo tree search

Yeray Galán López (), Cristian González García (), Vicente García Díaz (), Edward Rolando Núñez Valdez () and Alberto Gómez Gómez ()
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Yeray Galán López: University of Oviedo
Cristian González García: University of Oviedo
Vicente García Díaz: University of Oviedo
Edward Rolando Núñez Valdez: University of Oviedo
Alberto Gómez Gómez: University of Oviedo

Journal of Heuristics, 2024, vol. 30, issue 3, No 3, 173-198

Abstract: Abstract Packing problems have been studied for a long time and have great applications in real-world scenarios. In recent times, with problems in the industrial world increasing in size, exact algorithms are often not a viable option and faster approaches are needed. We study Monte Carlo tree search, a random sampling algorithm that has gained great importance in literature in the last few years. We propose three approaches based on MCTS and its integration with metaheuristic algorithms or deep learning models to obtain approximated solutions to packing problems that are also interpretable by means of MCTS exploration and from which knowledge can be extracted. We focus on two-dimensional rectangle packing problems in our experimentation and use several well known benchmarks from literature to compare our solutions with existing approaches and offer a view on the potential uses for knowledge extraction from our method. We manage to match the quality of state-of-the-art methods, with improvements in time with respect to some of them and greater interpretability.

Keywords: Rectangle packing; Monte Carlo tree search; Genetic algorithms; Machine learning; Interpretability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1007/s10732-024-09525-2

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