A GPU-accelerated Branch-and-Bound Algorithm for the Flow-Shop Scheduling Problem

TL;DR

This paper introduces a GPU-accelerated branch-and-bound algorithm for the flow-shop scheduling problem, significantly speeding up the bounding process and achieving up to 100x acceleration on large instances.

Contribution

It presents a novel GPU-based parallel bounding mechanism for B&B algorithms, optimizing data access for large data sets in combinatorial optimization.

Findings

Achieved up to 100x speedup on large problem instances.

Demonstrated superior performance over CPU-based methods.

Validated effectiveness on well-known FSP benchmarks.

Abstract

Branch-and-Bound (B&B) algorithms are time intensive tree-based exploration methods for solving to optimality combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, we investigate the use of GPU computing as a major complementary way to speed up those methods. The focus is put on the bounding mechanism of B&B algorithms, which is the most time consuming part of their exploration process. We propose a parallel B&B algorithm based on a GPU-accelerated bounding model. The proposed approach concentrate on optimizing data access management to further improve the performance of the bounding mechanism which uses large and intermediate data sets that do not completely fit in GPU memory. Extensive experiments of the contribution have been carried out on well known FSP benchmarks using an Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPU card. We compared the obtained performances to a single and a multithreaded CPU-based execution. Accelerations up to x100 are achieved for large problem instances.