A parallel implementation of an asynchronous team to the point-to-point connection problem

We propose a parallel and asynchronous approach to give near-optimal solutions to the non-fixed point-to-point connection problem. This problem is NP-hard and has practical applications in multicast routing. The technique adopted to solve the problem is an organization of heuristics that communicate with each other by means of a virtually shared memory. This technique is called A-Teams (for Asynchronous Teams). The virtual shared memory is implemented in a physically distributed memory system. Computational results comparing our approach with a branch-and-cut algorithm are presented. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.