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Abstract There is a trend to deploy neural network on edge devices in recent years. While the mainstream of research often concerns with single edge device processing and edge-cloud two-layer neural network collaborative computing, in this paper, we propose partitioning multi-layer edge network for neural network collaborative computing. With the proposed method, sub-models of neural network are deployed on multi-layer edge devices along the communication path from end users to cloud. Firstly, we propose an optimal path selection method to form a neural network collaborative computing path with lowest communication overhead. Secondly, we establish a time-delay optimization mathematical model to evaluate the effects of different partitioning solutions. To find the optimal partition solution, an ordered elitist genetic algorithm (OEGA) is proposed. The experimental results show that, compared with traditional cloud computing, single-device edge computing and edge-cloud collaborative computing, the proposed multi-layer edge network collaborative computing has a smaller runtime delay with limited bandwidth resources, and because of the pipeline computing characteristics, the proposed method has a better response speed when processing large number of requests. Meanwhile, the OEGA algorithm has better performance than conventional methods, and the optimized partitioning method outperforms other methods like random and evenly partition.