Study of shortest route between cities on the earth and optimization of component placement in chip mounter using SOM-TSP method

Abstract

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a problem of finding the shortest route back to the starting point after visiting each city only once. It is called an NP-complete problem, and many computational methods have been proposed. Referring previous Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) research, we have studied how to shorten the computation time for applying SOM to the TSP while keeping the original form. In this study, we applied and examined the problem of traveling cities on the earth and the optimization of component placement in a chip mounter, which is practical application. The results will be shown at the conference.