An application of parallel virtual machine framework to film production problem

Along with the rapid progress in computer technologies, both the theoretical foundations and practical applications of operations research are becoming more and more profound. In the literature, many techniques have been thus proposed to deal with real-world problems. However, the problems often exhibit complicated structures, and it is difficult to derive exact solutions in a reasonable time. PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine), the platform of our study, is a widely used environment in the world of parallel computing. It can be used to integrate existing department facilities without incurring additional hardware costs. Furthermore, the ease in programming also facilitates a wide adoption of PVM. In our study, we incorporate the concepts of the branch-and-bound method, multiprocess programming, and shared memory to design a parallel branch-and-bound algorithm to cope with the problem of minimizing talent hold cost in film production. We conduct a series of computational experiments to measure the effectiveness of our paralleization scheme. The results reveal that the speedup based upon our parallel algorithm is significant. This research provides a convincing demonstration in achieving effective parallelization with low costs.