Optimal design of multi-product batch plants using a parallel branch-and-bound method

Abstract

In this paper we develop and implement a parallel algorithm for a real-world application: finding optimal designs for multi-product batch plants. We describe two parallelization strategies - for systems with shared-memory and distributed-memory - based on the branch-and-bound paradigm and implement them using OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing) and MPI (Message Passing Interface), correspondingly. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach provides competitive speedup on modern clusters of multi-core processors. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.