A Kohonen-like decomposition method for the traveling salesman problem—KNIES_DECOMPOSE
Necati Aras, İ. Kuban Altınel, B. John Oommen · European Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 2000
In addition to the classical heuristic algorithms of operations research there have also been several approaches based on artificial neural networks which solve the traveling salesman problem (TSP). Their efficiency, however, decreases as the problem size (number of cities) increases. An idea to reduce the complexity of a large-scale TSP instance is to decompose or partition it into smaller subproblems, which are easier to solve. In this paper we introduce an all-neural decomposition heuristic that is based on a recent self-organizing map called KNIES which has been successfully implemented in solving both the Euclidean TSP and the Euclidean Hamiltonian path problem.