A parallel branch-and-bound algorithm with history-based domination and its application to the sequential ordering problem

In this paper, we describe the first parallel Branch-and-Bound (B&B) algorithm with a history-based domination technique. Although history-based domination substantially speeds up a B&B search, it makes parallelization much more challenging. Our algorithm is the first parallel exact algorith...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of parallel and distributed computing Vol. 172; pp. 131 - 143
Main Authors: Gonggiatgul, Taspon, Shobaki, Ghassan, Muyan-Özçelik, Pınar
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier Inc 01.02.2023
Subjects:
Combinatorial optimization
History domination
NP-complete problems
Parallel branch-and-bound
Sequential ordering problem
NP-complete problems
Parallel branch-and-bound
Sequential ordering problem
Combinatorial optimization
History domination
ISSN:0743-7315, 1096-0848
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:In this paper, we describe the first parallel Branch-and-Bound (B&B) algorithm with a history-based domination technique. Although history-based domination substantially speeds up a B&B search, it makes parallelization much more challenging. Our algorithm is the first parallel exact algorithm for the Sequential Ordering Problem using a pure B&B approach. To effectively explore the solution space, we have developed three novel parallelization techniques: thread restart, parallel history domination, and history-table memory management. The proposed algorithm was experimentally evaluated using the SOPLIB and TSPLIB benchmarks on multi-core processors. Using 32 threads with a time limit of one hour, the algorithm gives geometric-mean speedups of 72x and 20x on the medium-difficulty SOPLIB and TSPLIB instances, respectively. On the hard instances, it solves 12 instances that the sequential algorithm does not solve, with geometric-mean speedups of 16x on SOPLIB and 32x on TSPLIB. Super-linear speedups up to 366x are seen on 16 instances. •We propose the first parallel B&B algorithm that involves a history-based domination technique.•The proposed algorithm includes three novel parallelization techniques: thread restart, parallel history-based domination, and history-table memory management.•The proposed algorithm is the first parallel B&B algorithm for the Sequential Ordering Problem, which is an NP-hard sequencing problem with precedence constraints.•We present a thorough experimental evaluation of the proposed parallel algorithm on SOPLIB and TSPLIB. The results show that super-linear speedup is not an anomaly; it can be achieved on many instances. We report a speedup ratio as high as 285 on a 32-core processor.
ISSN:0743-7315
1096-0848
DOI:10.1016/j.jpdc.2022.10.007