A new cooperative framework for parallel trajectory-based metaheuristics

In this paper, we propose the Parallel Elite Biased framework (PEB framework) for parallel trajectory-based metaheuristics. In the PEB framework, multiple search processes are executed concurrently. During the search, each process sends its best found solutions to its neighboring processes and uses the received solutions to guide its search. Using the PEB framework, we design a parallel variant of Guided Local Search (GLS) called PEBGLS. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the Tianhe-2 supercomputer to study the performance of PEBGLS on the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The experimental results show that PEBGLS is a competitive parallel metaheuristic for the TSP, which confirms that the PEB framework is useful for designing parallel trajectory-based metaheuristics.