Combinatorial optimization with coupled chemical reaction cells

Many combinatorial optimization problems in industry can be reduced to a so-called assignment problem. This assignment problem can be handled by an adapted form of the nonlinear differential equations which are used to model the macroscopic behavior of complex physical systems. To get the necessary adaption specific coupling terms are used to result in a suitable selection and feasible solutions as stable points of the dynamical system. In comparison to many other methods this approach has the advantage that additional constraints of the optimization problem can easily be considered. Furthermore, parallel hardware realizations of this approach are possible because of the similarity to models of complex physical and chemical systems. A realization with coupled chemical reaction cells is suggested in this paper.