Solving Large Instances of Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem over Cell BE

Abstract

This paper presents a method to solve large instances of capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) using cellular genetic algorithm (cGA) with local search (LS) over cell broadband engine (cell BE) architecture. We propose a unique parallelization model where computationally intensive local search (LS) runs on the available synergistic processing elements (SPEs) in parallel, while the power processor element (PPE) runs the cGA and acts as a controller for all the SPEs. We reproduce the results from earlier work in PPE only implementation of the algorithm, and we show a considerable reduction in execution time for parallel implementation over cell BE. Moreover, we extended it further to solve larger instances of CVRP (compared to the ones present in the CVRP literature), and got acceptable results in a reasonable amount of time.