A Generic Solver Based on Functional Parallelism for Solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems

Abstract

This paper proposes a new class of parallel branch-and-bound (B&B) schemes. The main idea of the scheme is to focus on the functional parallelism instead of conventional data parallelism, and to support such a heterogeneous and irregular parallelism by using a collection of autonomous agents distributed over the network. After examining several implementation issues, we describe a detail of the prototype system implemented over eight PC's connected by a network. The result of experiments conducted over the prototype system indicates that the proposed parallel processing scheme significantly improves the performance of the underlying B&B scheme by adaptively switching exploring policies adopted by each agent participating to the problem solving.