This paper reports on the first international competition on AI for the
traveling salesman problem (TSP) at the International Joint Conference on
Artificial Intelligence 2021 (IJCAI-21). The TSP is one of the classical
combinatorial optimization problems, with many variants inspired by real-world
applications. This first competition asked the participants to develop
algorithms to solve a time-dependent orienteering problem with stochastic
weights and time windows (TD-OPSWTW). It focused on two types of learning
approaches: surrogate-based optimization and deep reinforcement learning. In
this paper, we describe the problem, the setup of the competition, the winning
methods, and give an overview of the results. The winning methods described in
this work have advanced the state-of-the-art in using AI for stochastic routing
problems. Overall, by organizing this competition we have introduced routing
problems as an interesting problem setting for AI researchers. The simulator of
the problem has been made open-source and can be used by other researchers as a
benchmark for new AI methods.

介绍 2021 年国际人工智能联合大会（IJCAI-21）上第一个旅行推销员问题（TSP）人工智能竞赛，关注基于学习的算法，介绍了该竞赛的问题、比赛安排、获胜方法和结果概述。竞赛的胜利方法使 AI 在随机路由问题上取得了技术进步，也使路由问题成为 AI 研究人员感兴趣的问题设定。同时，该比赛所使用的路由问题模拟器现已成为开源工具，可以成为其他研究人员使用的新 AI 方法基准测试。