GPU accelerated Hungarian algorithm for traveling salesman problem

In this thesis, we present a model of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) cast in a quadratic assignment problem framework with linearized objective function and constraints. This is referred to as Reformulation Linearization Technique at Level 2 (or RLT2). We apply dual ascent procedure for obtaining lower bounds that employs Linear Assignment Problem (LAP) solver recently developed by Date(2016). The solver is a parallelized Hungarian Algorithm that uses Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) enabled NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units (GPU) as the parallel programming architecture. The aim of this thesis is to make use of a modified version of the Dual Ascent-LAP solver to solve the TSP. Though this procedure is computational expensive, the bounds obtained are tight and our experimental results confirm that the gap is within 2% for most problems. However, due to limitations in computational resources, we could only test problem sizes N < 30. Further work can be directed at theoretical and computational analysis to test the efficiency of our approach for larger problem instances

Theoretical and computational advances in finite-size facility placement and assignment problems

The goal of this research is to develop fundamental theory and exact solution methods for the optimal placement of multiple, finite-size, rectangular facilities in presence of existing rectangular facilities, in a plane. Applications of this research can be found in facility layout (re)design in manufacturing, distribution systems, services (retail outlets, hospital floors, etc.), and printed circuit board design; where designing an efficient layout can save millions of dollars in operational costs. Main difficulty of this optimization problem lies in its continuous non-convex/non-concave feasible space, which makes it tough to escape local optimality. Through this research, novel approaches will be proposed which can be used to distill this continuous space into a finite set of candidate solutions, making it amenable to search for the global optimum. The first two parts of this research deal with establishing a unified theory for the finite-size facility placement problem and establishing the theory of dominance for pruning the sub-optimal solutions. Traditionally, the facility location/layout problems are modeled as the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP), which is strongly NP-hard. Also, for getting strong lower bounds in the dominance procedure, we may need to solve an instance of the NP-hard Quadratic Semi-Assignment Problem (QSAP). To this end, the third part of this research deals with investigating parallel and High Performance Computing (HPC) methods for solving the Linear Assignment Problem (LAP), which is an important sub-problem of the QAP. The final part of this research deals with investigating parallel and HPC methods for obtaining strong lower bounds and possibly solving large QAPs. Since QAP is known to be a computationally intensive problem, it should be noted that large in this context means problem instances with up to 30 facilities and locations