Short-term hydrothermal scheduling. II. Parallel simulated annealing approach

For pt.I see ibid., vol.141, no.5, p.497-501 (1994). The paper develops a coarse-grained parallel simulated annealing algorithm for short-term hydrothermal scheduling. The design of the algorithm has taken into consideration load balancing, processor synchronisation reduction, communication overhead reduction and memory contention elimination. The parallel algorithm is implemented on an i860 processor in a simulated environment and is applied to a test example. The scheduling results are presented and are compared with those found by a sequential algorithm. The results indicate that the algorithm can achieve a near linear reduction in computation time.