SHARED MEMORY IMPLEMENTATION OF CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION PROBLEM RESOLUTION

Many problems in Computer Science, especially in Artificial Intelligence, can be formulated as Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP). This paper presents a parallel implementation of the Forward-Checking algorithm for solving a binary CSP over finite domains. Its main contribution is to use a simple decomposition strategy in order to distribute dynamically the search tree among machines. The feasibility and benefit of this approach are studied for a Shared Memory model. An implementation is drafted using the new emergent standard OpenMP library for shared memory, thus controlling load balancing. We mainly highlight satisfactory efficiencies without using any tricky load balancing policy. All the experiments were carried out running on the Sillicon Graphics Origin 2000 parallel machine.