2009 Volume E92.A Issue 4 Pages 945-951
In advance of network communication society by the internet, the way how to send data fast with a little loss becomes an important transportation problem. A generalized maximum flow algorithm gives the best solution for the transportation problem that which route is appropriated to exchange data. Therefore, the importance of the maximum flow algorithm is growing more and more. In this paper, we propose a Maximum-Flow Neural Network (MF-NN) in which branch nonlinearity has a saturation characteristic and by which the maximum flow problem can be solved with analog high-speed parallel processing. That is, the proposed neural network for the maximum flow problem can be realized by a nonlinear resistive circuit where each connection weight between nodal neurons has a sigmodal or piece-wise linear function. The parallel hardware of the MF-NN will be easily implemented.
