OR-LLM-Agent: Automating Modeling and Solving of Operations Research Optimization Problem with Reasoning Large Language Model

Abstract: Operations Research (OR) has been widely applied in various fields such as resource allocation, production planning, and supply chain management. However, addressing real-world OR problems requires OR experts to perform mathematical modeling and programmers to develop solution algorithms. This traditional method, heavily reliant on experts, is costly and has long development cycles, severely limiting the widespread adoption of OR techniques. Few have considered using AI to replace professionals to achieve fully automated solutions for OR problems. We propose OR-LLM-Agent, the first AI agent that enables end-to-end automation for solving real-world OR problems. OR-LLM-Agent leverages the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities of LLMs to translate natural language problem descriptions into formal mathematical models and automatically generate Gurobi solver code. In OR-LLM-Agent, OR-CodeAgent is designed to automate code execution and repair within a sandbox environment, facilitating the derivation of the final solution. Due to the lack of dedicated benchmark datasets for evaluating the automated solving of OR problems, we construct a benchmark dataset comprising 83 real-world OR problems described in natural language. We conduct comparative experiments with state-of-the-art (SOTA) reasoning LLMs, including GPT-o3-mini, DeepSeek-R1, and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking. The OR-LLM-Agent achieved the highest pass rate of 100% and the highest solution accuracy of 85%, demonstrating the feasibility of automated OR problem-solving. Data and code have been publicly available at https://github.com/bwz96sco/or_llm_agent.