Parallel Branch-and-Bound for Chemical Engineering Applications: Load Balancing and Scheduling Issues

. Branch-and-prune (BP) and branch-and-bound (BB) techniques are commonly used for intelligent search in nding all solutions, or the optimal solution, within a space of interest. The corresponding binary tree structure provides a natural parallelism allowing concurrent evaluation of subproblems using parallel computing technology. Of special interest here are techniques derived from interval analysis, in particular an interval-Newton/generalized-bisection procedure. In this context, we discuss issues of load balancing and work scheduling that arise in the implementation of parallel BB and BP, and describe and analyze techniques for this purpose. These techniques are applied to solve problems appearing in chemical process engineering using a distributed parallel computing system. Results show that a consistently high eciency can be achieved in solving nonlinear equations, providing excellent scalability. The eectiveness of the approach used is also demonstrated in the co..