The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is one of the most difficult problems that occur in different types of industrial scheduling situations. We propose a solution, involving local clustering organization (LCO), for a large-scale TSP based on the principle of the self-organizing map (SOM). Although the SOM can solve TSPs, it is not applicable to practical TSPs because the SOM references city coordinates and assigns synapses to coordinates. LCO indirectly uses the SOM principle and, instead of city coordinates, references costs between two cities, to determine the sequence of cities. We apply LCO to a large-scale TSP to determine its efficiency in numerical experiments. Results demonstrate that LCO obtains the desired solutions.
An efficient self-organizing map designed by genetic algorithms for the traveling salesman problem
