The self-organizing map (SOM), as a kind of unsupervised neural network, has been used for both static
data management and dynamic data analysis. To further exploit its search abilities, in this paper we
propose an SOM-based algorithm (SOMS) for optimization problems involving both static and dynamic
functions. Furthermore, a new SOM weight updating rule is proposed to enhance the learning efficiency;
this may dynamically adjust the neighborhood function for the SOM in learning system parameters. As
a demonstration, the proposed SOMS is applied to function optimization and also dynamic trajectory
prediction, and its performance compared with that of the genetic algorithm (GA) due to the similar