A FPGA-based custom computing system for solving the assignment problem

The assignment problem is a classical combinatorial optimization problem arising in numerous design and planning contexts. Solving an assignment problem of large scale is computationally intensive and time consuming. The paper discusses the development of an FPGA based custom computing system that can accelerate the computation by exploiting the intrinsic parallelism of a recently proposed recurrent neural network for solving the assignment problem. The theoretical background of this work has been discussed in other papers. The digital realization of the system, including architecture, design, FPGA implementation and verification are discussed.