A Parallel Method for the Assignment Problem

In this paper, a two-phase method is presented for the selection of machines to be kept on the shop floor and the assignment of parts to be manufactured for these machines. In the first phase, dynamic programming or a heuristic procedure identifies a set of feasible solutions to a "knapsack problem. " In the second phase, implicit enumeration technique or a greedy algorithm solves an assignment problem. The proposed method is written in language C and runs on a parallel virtual machine called PVM-W95. The results obtained from the parallel implementation on several examples which are found in the literature, as well as examples generated at random, were used to establish a comparison with the sequential algorithm and to perform a speedup analysis.