title: An efficient approach to the travelling salesman problem using self-organizing maps.
abstract: This paper presents an approach to the well-known Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) using Self-Organizing Maps (SOM). The SOM algorithm has interesting topological information about its neurons configuration on cartesian space, which can be used to solve optimization problems. Aspects of initialization, parameters adaptation, and complexity analysis of the proposed SOM based algorithm are discussed. The results show an average deviation of 3.7% from the optimal tour length for a set of 12 TSP instances.
authors.affiliation: Computer Engineering Department, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal-RN, 59072-970, Brazil. fred@dca.ufrn.br
authors.forename: Frederico Carvalho
authors.initials: FC
authors.lastname: Vieira
authors.forename: Adrião Duarte
authors.initials: AD
authors.lastname: Dória Neto
authors.forename: José Alfredo Ferreira
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Costa
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D008377:Maps as Topic; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology; D011340:Problem Solving; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014195:Travel