An application of parallel virtual machine framework to film production problem

Along with the rapid progress in computer technologies, both the theoretica l foundations and practical applications of operations research are becomin g more and more profound. In the literature, many techniques have been thus proposed to deal with real-world problems. However, the problems often exh ibit complicated structures, and it is difficult to derive exact solutions in a reasonable time. PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine), the platform of our s tudy, is a widely used environment in the world of parallel computing. It c an be used to integrate existing departmental facilities without incurring additional hardware costs. Furthermore, the ease in programming also facili tates a wide adoption of PVM. In our study, we incorporate the concepts of the branch-and-bound method, multiprocess programming, and shared memory to design a parallel branch-and-bound algorithm to cope with the problem of m inimizing talent field cost in film production. We conduct a series of comp utational experiments to measure the effectiveness of our parallelization s cheme. The results reveal that the speedup based upon our parallel algorith m is significant. This research provides a convincing demonstration in achi eving effective parallelization with low costs. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science L td, All rights reserved.