Task Allocation by Parallel Evolutionary Computing

In this paper we will investigate the applicability of parallel evolutionary algorithms to the task allocation problem?a long standing problem in parallel computing. Three different evolutionary optimization strategies, genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, and steepest descent, are formulated in a parallel generic framework. In order to enhance the performance of the strategies, a number of adjustments that exploit problem specific knowledge is proposed. We adopt a parametric description of static parallel applications. As a consequence, a theoretical analysis of the task allocation solution space can be conducted with a method originating from computational biology. The prediction following from this analysis, i.e., simulated annealing performs optimally on the solution space, is supported by experimental results.

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