Distributed solution of optimal hybrid control problems on networks of workstations

The design of an optimal control strategy for a hybrid system is a matter of growing interest in computational engineering. The solution of optimization problems in most engineering disciplines often requires efficient parallel optimization algorithms to solve these kinds of problems in reasonable time. Instead of introducing parallelism to selected components of an existing sequential algorithm, the algorithm proposed in this paper is aimed at utilizing the available computational resources efficiently throughout the course of the optimization. To assure a certain level of efficiency the algorithm can be adapted to the available resources and the dimension of the problem to be solved. The features of this inherently parallel algorithm are described, and the parallel performance is analyzed by means of a scalability analysis. To demonstrate the use of the algorithm for the solution of optimization problems in computational engineering, two problems from groundwater engineering are solved