Implementation and performance analysis of parallel assignment algorithms on a hypercube computer

Abstract

The process of effectively coordinating and controlling resources during a military engagement is known as battle management/command, control, and communications (BM/C3). One key task of BM/C3 is allocating weapons to destroy targets. The focus of this research is on developing parallel computation methods to achieve fast and cost effective assignment of weapons to targets. Using the sequential Hungarian method for solving the assignment problem as a basis, this paper presents the development and the relative performance comparison of four parallel assignment methodologies that have been implemented on the Intel iPSC hypercube computer. The first three approaches are approximations to the optimal assignment solution. The advantage to these is that they are computationally fast and have proven to generate assignments that are very close the optimal assignment in terms of cost. The fourth approach is a parallel implementation of the Hungarian algorithm, where certain subtasks are performed in parallel. This approach produces an optimal assignment as compared to the sub-optimal assignments that result from the first three approaches. The relative performance of the four approaches is compared by varying the number of weapons and targets, the number of processors used, and the size of the problem partitions.