A New Heuristic Procedure To Solve The Traveling Salesman Problem

Abstract

This paper presents a heuristic technique that uses the Wang Recurrent Neural Network with the "Winner Takes All" principle to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem. When the Wang Neural Network presents solutions for the Assignment Problem with all constraints satisfied, the "Winner Takes All" principle is applied to the values in the Neural Network's decision variables, with the additional constraint that the new solution must form a feasible route for the Traveling Salesman Problem. The results from this new technique are compared to other heuristics, with data from the TSPLIB (Traveling Salesman Problem Library). The 2-opt local search technique is applied to the final solutions of the proposed technique and shows a considerable improvement of the results.