A learning method in Hopfield neural network for combinatorial optimization problem

In this letter, we utilize the Hopfield network learning method to adjust the balance between constraint term and cost term of the energy function so that the local minimum that the network once falls into vanishes and the network can continue updating in a gradient descent direction of energy. We applied the proposed learning method to the traveling salesman problem to show that the method is capable of finding an optimal solution or a near-optimal solution in a shorter time. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.