Self-Guided LLM Reasoning for Error Diagnosis in Vehicle Routing Problems

Ni Zhang, Jianan Zhou, Yue-Jiao Gong, Zhiguang Cao

Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) are fundamental to many real-world applications. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have spurred progress in solving these NP-hard problems. However, most existing approaches assume that input instances are error-free, neglecting the presence of faults commonly encountered in real-world data. In this work, we systematically investigate the capability of LLMs to detect (and correct) errors in VRP instances, and identify key limitations, particularly in handling complex instances or errors that substantially increase the LLM's reasoning burden. To overcome these challenges, we propose a self-guided reasoning framework in which LLMs autonomously generate code that provides structured insights to aid in error diagnosis. Experiments across diverse problem settings and LLMs demonstrate that our framework significantly improves error detection performance, achieving near-perfect accuracy.