Depot-Closed Multi-Component Construction for Neural Vehicle Routing

Most neural constructive solvers for the vehicle routing problem (VRP) use route-by-route construction, extending one route until completion before starting the next. This commits route membership early and hinders global coordination across routes. We propose multi-component construction, which maintains many route components simultaneously and merges them in an arbitrary order. This removes the depot-return cue that route-by-route construction obtains from the remaining capacity; to compensate, we introduce an interpretation in which every component is treated as an implicitly depot-closed route. Under this depot-closed interpretation, every intermediate state of standard CVRP construction is a complete feasible solution, and the exact cost reduction of a merge is the Clarke–Wright saving. The neural policy combines this CW-saving signal with the evolving component state to learn what to connect and when to connect. A policy trained only on CVRP100 outperforms the reported results of representative neural solvers on CVRP100–500 with greedy inference and, reused for ruin-and-reconstruct, performs strongly at all evaluated sizes up to CVRP1000. In a zero-shot Constraint Tightness evaluation with capacities from $C=10$ to $500$, it outperforms the reported neural solvers at every capacity. Controlled analyses show that robustness persists without CW grounding and point to learned route-closing behavior as a plausible contributor to the tight-regime degradation of learned route-by-route solvers.