Solving vehicle routing problems using elastic nets

Using neural networks to find an approximate solution to difficult optimization problems is a very attractive prospect. The traveling salesman problem (TSP), probably the best-known problem in combinatorial optimization, has been attacked by a variety of neural network approaches. The main purpose of this paper is to show how elastic network ideas can be applied to two TSP generalizations: the multiple traveling salesmen problem (MTSP) and the vehicle routing problem (VRP).<
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