# Solving Vehicle Routing Problem with Amazon SageMaker RL

## NOTE: This notebook only works with an older version of Ray and Tensorflow. We are not planning to upgrade this notebook to use the latest Ray at the moment.

In this notebook, you will see how reinforcement learning can be used to solve a Vehicle Routing Probelm (VRP). Given one or more vehicles and a set of locations, VRP tries to find the route that reaches all locations with minimal operational cost. This problem has been of great interest for decades, as it has a wide application in logistics, parcel delivery, and more. It has many variants that characterize different constraints or features, among which online and stochastic version is considered in this example.

## Problem Statement

Consider a delivery driver using a phone app, orders arrive on the app in a dynamic manner. Each order has a delivery charge known to the driver at the time of order creation, and it is assigned to a location in the city. The city is a grid map and consists of mutually exclusive zones that generate orders at different rates and rewards. The orders have a delivery time limit, the timer starts with the order creation and is same for all orders. The driver has to accept an order and pick up the package from a given location prior to delivery. The vehicle has a capacity limit, but the driver can accept unlimited orders and plan their route accordingly. The driver’s goal is to maximize the total net reward.

This formulation is known as stochastic and dynamic capacitated vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery, time windows and service guarantee.

At each time step, the RL agent is aware of the following information: - Pickup location - Driver info: driver’s position, capacity left - Order info: order’s location, order’s status (open, accepted, picked up or delivered), time elapsed since each order’s generation, order dollar value

At each time step, the RL agent can take one of the following actions: - Accept an order - Pick up an accepted order - Go to a customer’s node for delivery - Head to a specific pickup location - Wait and stay unmoved

During training, the agent cannot perform the following invalid actions: (i) pick up an order when its remaining capacity is 0; (ii) pick up an order that is not yet accepted; (iii) deliver an order that is not yet picked up.

At each time step, the reward is defined as the difference between total value of all delivered orders and cost: - Total value of all delivered orders is divided into 3 equal parts – when the order gets accepted, picked up, and delivered respectively - Cost includes time cost and moving cost. Both are per time step - A large penalty is imposed if the agent accepts an order but fails to deliver within the delivery limit

## Using Amazon SageMaker for RL

Amazon SageMaker allows you to train your RL agents in cloud machines using docker containers. You do not have to worry about setting up your machines with the RL toolkits and deep learning frameworks. You can easily switch between many different machines setup for you, including powerful GPU machines that give a big speedup. You can also choose to use multiple machines in a cluster to further speedup training, often necessary for production level loads.

## Pre-requisites

### Roles and permissions

To get started, we’ll import the Python libraries we need, set up the environment with a few prerequisites for permissions and configurations.

[ ]:

import sagemaker
import boto3
import sys
import os
import glob
import re
import subprocess
from IPython.display import HTML
import time
from time import gmtime, strftime

sys.path.append("common")
from misc import get_execution_role, wait_for_s3_object, wait_for_training_job_to_complete
from sagemaker.rl import RLEstimator, RLToolkit, RLFramework


### Setup S3 bucket

Set up the linkage and authentication to the S3 bucket that you want to use for checkpoint and the metadata.

[ ]:

# S3 bucket
sage_session = sagemaker.session.Session()
s3_bucket = sage_session.default_bucket()
s3_output_path = "s3://{}/".format(s3_bucket)
print("S3 bucket path: {}".format(s3_output_path))


### Define Variables

We define variables such as the job prefix for the training jobs and the image path for the container (only when this is BYOC).

[ ]:

# create unique job name
job_name_prefix = "rl-vehicle-routing"


### Configure settings

You can run your RL training jobs on a SageMaker notebook instance or on your own machine. In both of these scenarios, you can run the following in either local or SageMaker modes. The local mode uses the SageMaker Python SDK to run your code in a local container before deploying to SageMaker. This can speed up iterative testing and debugging while using the same familiar Python SDK interface. You just need to set local_mode = True.

[ ]:

local_mode = False

if local_mode:
instance_type = "local"
else:
# If on SageMaker, pick the instance type
instance_type = "ml.m5.xlarge"


### Create an IAM role

Either get the execution role when running from a SageMaker notebook instance role = sagemaker.get_execution_role() or, when running from local notebook instance, use utils method role = get_execution_role() to create an execution role.

[ ]:

try:
role = sagemaker.get_execution_role()
except:
role = get_execution_role()

print("Using IAM role arn: {}".format(role))


### Install docker for local mode

In order to work in local mode, you need to have docker installed. When running from you local machine, please make sure that you have docker or docker-compose (for local CPU machines) and nvidia-docker (for local GPU machines) installed. Alternatively, when running from a SageMaker notebook instance, you can simply run the following script to install dependenceis.

Note, you can only run a single local notebook at one time.

[ ]:

# only run from SageMaker notebook instance
if local_mode:
!/bin/bash ./common/setup.sh


## Set up the environment

The environment is defined in a Python file called autoscalesim.py and the file is uploaded on /src directory.

The environment also implements the init(), step() and reset() functions that describe how the environment behaves. This is consistent with Open AI Gym interfaces for defining an environment.

1. init() - initialize the environment in a pre-defined state

2. step() - take an action on the environment

3. reset()- restart the environment on a new episode

4. [if applicable] render() - get a rendered image of the environment in its current state

[ ]:

# uncomment the following line to see the environment
# !pygmentize src/vrp_env.py


## Write the training code

The training code is written in the file train_bin_packing.py which is also uploaded in the /src directory. First import the environment files and the preset files, and then define the main() function.

[ ]:

!pygmentize src/train_vehicle_routing_problem.py


## Train the RL model using the Python SDK Script mode

If you are using local mode, the training will run on the notebook instance. When using SageMaker for training, you can select a GPU or CPU instance. The RLEstimator is used for training RL jobs.

1. Specify the source directory where the gym environment and training code is uploaded.

2. Specify the entry point as the training code

3. Specify the choice of RL toolkit and framework. This automatically resolves to the ECR path for the RL Container.

4. Define the training parameters such as the instance count, job name, S3 path for output and job name.

5. Specify the hyperparameters for the RL agent algorithm. The RLCOACH_PRESET or the RLRAY_PRESET can be used to specify the RL agent algorithm you want to use.

6. Define the metrics definitions that you are interested in capturing in your logs. These can also be visualized in CloudWatch and SageMaker Notebooks.

### Define Metric

A list of dictionaries that defines the metric(s) used to evaluate the training jobs. Each dictionary contains two keys: ‘Name’ for the name of the metric, and ‘Regex’ for the regular expression used to extract the metric from the logs.

[ ]:

metric_definitions = [
{
"Name": "episode_reward_mean",
"Regex": "episode_reward_mean: ([-+]?[0-9]*\\.?[0-9]+([eE][-+]?[0-9]+)?)",
},
{
"Name": "episode_reward_max",
"Regex": "episode_reward_max: ([-+]?[0-9]*\\.?[0-9]+([eE][-+]?[0-9]+)?)",
},
{
"Name": "episode_reward_min",
"Regex": "episode_reward_min: ([-+]?[0-9]*\\.?[0-9]+([eE][-+]?[0-9]+)?)",
},
]


### Define Estimator

This Estimator executes an RLEstimator script in a managed Reinforcement Learning (RL) execution environment within a SageMaker Training Job. The managed RL environment is an Amazon-built Docker container that executes functions defined in the supplied entry_point Python script.

[ ]:

train_entry_point = "train_vehicle_routing_problem.py"
train_job_max_duration_in_seconds = 60 * 15

estimator = RLEstimator(
entry_point=train_entry_point,
source_dir="src",
dependencies=["common/sagemaker_rl"],
toolkit=RLToolkit.RAY,
toolkit_version="0.6.5",
framework=RLFramework.TENSORFLOW,
role=role,
instance_type=instance_type,
instance_count=1,
output_path=s3_output_path,
base_job_name=job_name_prefix,
metric_definitions=metric_definitions,
max_run=train_job_max_duration_in_seconds,
hyperparameters={},
)

[ ]:

estimator.fit(wait=local_mode)
job_name = estimator.latest_training_job.job_name
print("Training job: %s" % job_name)


## Visualization

RL training can take a long time. So while it’s running there are a variety of ways we can track progress of the running training job. Some intermediate output gets saved to S3 during training, so we’ll set up to capture that.

[ ]:

s3_url = "s3://{}/{}".format(s3_bucket, job_name)

intermediate_folder_key = "{}/output/intermediate/".format(job_name)
intermediate_url = "s3://{}/{}training/".format(s3_bucket, intermediate_folder_key)

print("S3 job path: {}".format(s3_url))
print("Intermediate folder path: {}".format(intermediate_url))


### Plot metrics for training job

We can see the reward metric of the training as it’s running, using algorithm metrics that are recorded in CloudWatch metrics. We can plot this to see the performance of the model over time.

[ ]:

%matplotlib inline
from sagemaker.analytics import TrainingJobAnalytics

if not local_mode:
wait_for_training_job_to_complete(job_name)  # Wait for the job to finish
df = TrainingJobAnalytics(job_name, ["episode_reward_mean"]).dataframe()
df_min = TrainingJobAnalytics(job_name, ["episode_reward_min"]).dataframe()
df_max = TrainingJobAnalytics(job_name, ["episode_reward_max"]).dataframe()
df["rl_reward_mean"] = df["value"]
df["rl_reward_min"] = df_min["value"]
df["rl_reward_max"] = df_max["value"]
num_metrics = len(df)

if num_metrics == 0:
print("No algorithm metrics found in CloudWatch")
else:
plt = df.plot(
x="timestamp",
y=["rl_reward_mean"],
figsize=(18, 6),
fontsize=18,
legend=True,
style="-",
color=["b", "r", "g"],
)
plt.fill_between(df.timestamp, df.rl_reward_min, df.rl_reward_max, color="b", alpha=0.2)
plt.set_ylabel("Mean reward per episode", fontsize=20)
plt.set_xlabel("Training time (s)", fontsize=20)
plt.legend(loc=4, prop={"size": 20})
else:
print("Can't plot metrics in local mode.")


#### Monitor training progress

You can repeatedly run the visualization cells to get the latest metrics as the training job proceeds.

## Training Results

You can let the training job run longer by specifying train_max_run in RLEstimator. The figure below illustrates the reward function of the RL policy vs. that of a MIP baseline. The experiments are conducted on a p3.2x instance. For more details on the environment setup and how different parameters are set, please refer to ORL: Reinforcement Learning Benchmarks for Online Stochastic Optimization Problems.