PARMETAOPT — Parallel metaheuristics framework for combinatorial optimization problems

The paper presents an experimental parallel metaheuristics framework for solving combinatorial optimization of grand challenge scientific and engineering problems that has been developed based on biologically inspired metaheuristics, modeling of social behavior and cultural evolution as well as trajectory-based methods. A prototype class library for metaheuristics is developed and several parallel computational models of metaheuristics for solving combinatorial optimization problems are implemented. The library contains implementations in C++ of parallel computational models for both population based and trajectory based metaheuristics. Some improvements in the parallel models are suggested and implemented in the library PARMETAOPT. The influence of the parameters on the performance of some of the parallel algorithms is analyzed using the developed parallel metaheuristics framework and performance tuning rules are suggested. The implementations are based on message passing with MPICH2 for the flat programming models and OpenMP API is used for multithreading in the hybrid programming models.