B. Bourbeau et al., Branch-acid-bound parallelization strategies applied to a depot location and container fleet management problem, PARALLEL C, 26(1), 2000, pp. 27-46
This paper presents branch-and-bound parallelization strategies applied to
the location/ allocation problem with balancing requirements. This formulat
ion is representative of a larger class of discrete network design and loca
tion problems arising in many transportation logistics and telecommunicatio
ns applications: it displays a multicommodity network flow structure and a
complex objective function comprising fixed and variable flow costs. As for
many problems of this class, the bounding procedure embedded in the branch
-and-bound algorithm is complex and time-consuming. The parallelization str
ategies that we describe are designed to exploit this feature. Parallelism
is obtained by dividing the search tree among processors and performing ope
rations on several subproblems simultaneously. The strategies differ in the
way they manage the list of subproblems and control the search. We report
and analyze experimental results, on a distributed network of workstations,
which aim to compare different implementations of these strategies. (C) 20
00 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.