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Neurodynamic programming: a case study of the traveling salesman problem

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Abstract

The paper focuses on the study of solving the large-scale traveling salesman problem (TSP) based on neurodynamic programming. From this perspective, two methods, temporal difference learning and approximate Sarsa, are presented in detail. In essence, both of them try to learn an appropriate evaluation function on the basis of a finite amount of experience. To evaluate their performances, some computational experiments on both the Euclidean and asymmetric TSP instances are conducted. In contrast with the large size of the state space, only a few training sets have been used to obtain the initial results. Hence, the results are acceptable and encouraging in comparisons with some classical algorithms, and further study of this kind of methods, as well as applications in combinatorial optimization problems, is worth investigating.

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Acknowledgments

This research has been supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 60205004, 50475179, 60528002, 60621001, and 60635010), the National Basic Research Program (973) of China under Grant 2002CB312200, and the Hi-Tech R&D Program (863) of China (Grant 2006AA04Z258).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Complex Systems and Intelligence Science, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100080, China

    Jia Ma, Tao Yang, Zeng-Guang Hou & Min Tan

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, 60607, USA

    Derong Liu

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  1. Jia Ma
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  2. Tao Yang
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  3. Zeng-Guang Hou
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Correspondence to Zeng-Guang Hou.

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Ma, J., Yang, T., Hou, ZG. et al. Neurodynamic programming: a case study of the traveling salesman problem. Neural Comput & Applic 17, 347–355 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-007-0127-5

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