ABSTRACT
Branch-and-bound intelligently searches the set of feasible solutions to a combinatorial optimization problem. Branch-and-bound algorithms may be easily modified to generate suboptimal solutions. The branch-and-bound computation is decomposed into tasks, each of which is executed on a computer server. There also has been a lot of work on what might be called programming frameworks for distributed branch-and-bound computation. M. O. Neary et al. present an infrastructure/framework for distributed computing, including branch-and-bound that tolerates faulty compute servers, and is in pure Java allowing application codes to run on a heterogeneous set of machine types and operating systems. The framework allows the application developer to focus on the problem-specific aspects of branch-and-bound: the lower bound computation, the upper bound computation, and the branching rule. A. Iamnitchi and I. Foster build on the idea of exploiting branch-and-bound’s tree-structured search space, producing a branch and bound-specific fault tolerance scheme that is distributed, although they provide only simulation results.
