260 research outputs found
Dynamic Demand-Capacity Balancing for Air Traffic Management Using Constraint-Based Local Search: First Results
Using constraint-based local search, we effectively model and efficiently
solve the problem of balancing the traffic demands on portions of the European
airspace while ensuring that their capacity constraints are satisfied. The
traffic demand of a portion of airspace is the hourly number of flights planned
to enter it, and its capacity is the upper bound on this number under which
air-traffic controllers can work. Currently, the only form of demand-capacity
balancing we allow is ground holding, that is the changing of the take-off
times of not yet airborne flights. Experiments with projected European flight
plans of the year 2030 show that already this first form of demand-capacity
balancing is feasible without incurring too much total delay and that it can
lead to a significantly better demand-capacity balance
Parallel constraint-based local search on the HA8000 supercomputer (abstract)
We present a parallel implementation of a constraint-based local search algorithm and investigate its performance re- sults on hardware with several hundreds of processors
Large-scale parallelism for constraint-based local search: the costas array case study
International audienceWe present the parallel implementation of a constraint-based Local Search algorithm and investigate its performance on several hardware plat-forms with several hundreds or thousands of cores. We chose as the basis for these experiments the Adaptive Search method, an efficient sequential Local Search method for Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP). After preliminary experiments on some CSPLib benchmarks, we detail the modeling and solving of a hard combinatorial problem related to radar and sonar applications: the Costas Array Problem. Performance evaluation on some classical CSP bench-marks shows that speedups are very good for a few tens of cores, and good up to a few hundreds of cores. However for a hard combinatorial search problem such as the Costas Array Problem, performance evaluation of the sequential version shows results outperforming previous Local Search implementations, while the parallel version shows nearly linear speedups up to 8,192 cores. The proposed parallel scheme is simple and based on independent multi-walks with no communication between processes during search. We also investigated a cooperative multi-walk scheme where processes share simple information, but this scheme does not seem to improve performance
A framework for constraint based local search using ESSENCE
Structured Neighbourhood Search (SNS) is a framework for constraint-based local search for problems expressed in the Essence abstract constraint specification language. The local search explores a structured neighbourhood, where each state in the neighbourhood preserves a high level structural feature of the problem. SNS derives highly structured problem-specific neighbourhoods automatically and directly from the features of the ESSENCE specification of the problem. Hence, neighbourhoods can represent important structural features of the problem, such as partitions of sets, even if that structure is obscured in the low-level input format required by a constraint solver. SNS expresses each neighbourhood as a constrained optimisation problem, which is solved with a constraint solver. We have implemented SNS, together with automatic generation of neighbourhoods for high level structures, and report high quality results for several optimisation problems
Parallel local search for solving Constraint Problems on the Cell Broadband Engine (Preliminary Results)
We explore the use of the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/BE for short) for
combinatorial optimization applications: we present a parallel version of a
constraint-based local search algorithm that has been implemented on a
multiprocessor BladeCenter machine with twin Cell/BE processors (total of 16
SPUs per blade). This algorithm was chosen because it fits very well the
Cell/BE architecture and requires neither shared memory nor communication
between processors, while retaining a compact memory footprint. We study the
performance on several large optimization benchmarks and show that this
achieves mostly linear time speedups, even sometimes super-linear. This is
possible because the parallel implementation might explore simultaneously
different parts of the search space and therefore converge faster towards the
best sub-space and thus towards a solution. Besides getting speedups, the
resulting times exhibit a much smaller variance, which benefits applications
where a timely reply is critical
Constraint-Based Local Search for Inventory Control Under Stochastic Demand and Lead Time
In this paper, we address the general multiperiod production/inventory problem with nonstationary stochastic demand and supplier lead time under service-level constraints. A replenishment cycle policy is modeled. We propose two hybrid algorithms that blend constraint programming and local search for computing near-optimal policy parameters. Both algorithms rely on a coordinate descent local search strategy; what differs is the way this strategy interacts with the constraint programming solver. These two heuristics are first, compared for small instances against an existing optimal solution method. Second, they are tested and compared with each other in terms of solution quality and run time on a set of larger instances that are intractable for the exact approach. Our numerical experiments show the effectiveness of our methods
Large-Scale Parallelism for Constraint-Based Local Search: The Costas Array Case Study
Abstract We present the parallel implementation of a constraint-based Local Search algorithm and investigate its performance on several hardware platforms with several hundreds or thousands of cores. We chose as the basis for these experiments the Adaptive Search method, an efficient sequential Local Search method for Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP). After preliminary experiments on some CSPLib benchmarks, we detail the modeling and solving of a hard combinatorial problem related to radar and sonar applications: the Costas Array Problem. Performance evaluation on some classical CSP benchmarks shows that speedups are very good for a few tens of cores, and good up to a few hundreds of cores. However for a hard combinatorial search problem such as the Costas Array Problem, performance evaluation of the sequential version shows results outperforming previous Local Search implementations, while the parallel version shows nearly linear speedups up to 8,192 cores. The proposed parallel scheme is simple and based on independent multi-walks with no communication between processes during search. We also investigated a cooperative multi-walk scheme where processes share simple information, but this scheme does not seem to improve performance
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