TITLE:
Parallelization of a Branch and Bound Algorithm on Multicore Systems
AUTHORS:
Chia-Shin Chung, James Flynn, Janche Sang
KEYWORDS:
Parallel Branch and Bound; Multithreaded Programming; Multicore System; Permutation Flowshop; Software Reuse
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.5 No.8,
August
28,
2012
ABSTRACT: The general m-machine permutation flowshop problem with the total flow-time objective is known to be NP-hard for m ≥ 2. The only practical method for finding optimal solutions has been branch-and-bound algorithms. In this paper, we present an improved sequential algorithm which is based on a strict alternation of Generation and Exploration execution modes as well as Depth-First/Best-First hybrid strategies. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme exhibits improved performance compared with the algorithm in [1]. More importantly, our method can be easily extended and implemented with lightweight threads to speed up the execution times. Good speedups can be obtained on shared-memory multicore systems.