This study proposes a hybrid deep-learning-metaheuristic framework with a bi-level architecture for road network design problems (NDPs). We train a graph neural network (GNN) to approximate the solution of the user equilibrium (UE) traffic assignment problem, and use inferences made by the trained model to calculate fitness function evaluations of a genetic algorithm (GA) to approximate solutions for NDPs. Using two NDP variants and an exact solver as benchmark, we show that our proposed framework can provide solutions within 5% gap of the global optimum results given less than 1% of the time required for finding the optimal results. Our framework can be utilized within an expert system for infrastructure planning to intelligently determine the best infrastructure management decisions. Given the flexibility of the framework, it can easily be adapted to many other decision problems that can be modeled as bi-level problems on graphs. Moreover, we observe many interesting future directions, thus we propose a brief research agenda for this topic. The key observation inspiring influential future research was that fitness function evaluation time using the inferences made by the GNN model for the genetic algorithm was in the order of milliseconds, which points to an opportunity and a need for novel heuristics that 1) can cope well with noisy fitness function values provided by neural networks, and 2) can use the significantly higher computation time provided to them to explore the search space effectively (rather than efficiently). This opens a new avenue for a modern class of metaheuristics that are crafted for use with AI-powered predictors.

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