Self-Organizing Map for the Prize-Collecting Traveling Salesman Problem

In this paper, we propose novel adaptation rules for the self-organizing map to solve the prize-collecting traveling salesman problem (PC-TSP). The goal of the PC-TSP is to find a cost-efficient tour to collect prizes by visiting a subset of a given set of locations. In contrast with the classical traveling salesman problem, where all given locations must be visited, locations in the PC-TSP may be skipped at the cost of some additional penalty. Using the self-organizing map, locations for the final solution may be selected during network adaptation, and locations where visitation would be more expensive than their penalty can be avoided. We have applied the proposed self-organizing map learning procedure to autonomous data collection problems, where the proposed approach provides results competitive with an existing combinatorial solver.