Inspired by the modulation mechanism of neuroendocrine-immune system(NEIs),a novel structure of artificial neural network(ANN) named NEI-NN and its learning method are presented.The NEI-NN includes two parts,i.e.,positive subnetwork(PSN) and negative sub-network(NSN).The neuron functions of PSN and NSN are designed according to the increased and decreased secretion functions of hormone,respectively.In order to make the novel neural network learn quickly,the novel neuron based on some characteristics of NEIs is also redesigned.Besides the normal input signals,two control signals are considered in the proposed solution.One is the enable/disable signal,and the other is the slope control signal.The former can modify the structure of NEI-NN,and the later can regulate the evolutionary speed of NEINN.The NEI-NN can obtain the optimized network structure by using error back-propagation(BP) learning algorithm.Since the modeling of the beam pumping unit is very difficult by using the conventional method,the modeling of bean bump unit is chosen to examine the performance of the NEI-NN.The experiment results show that the optimized structure and learning speed of NEI-NN are better than those of the conventional neural network.
