Asynchronous organizations for solving the point-to-point connection problem

Abstract

We present an agent approach to solve the nonfixed point-to-point connection problem. The optimization version of this problem is NP-hard and has numerous applications in circuit switching and VLSI design. We use Asynchronous Teams (or A-Teams) technique to search for an optimal global solution. An A-Team is an organization of agents that communicate with each other by means of shared memories. Each agent is a heuristic strategy that can make its own choices about its inputs, scheduling and resource allocation. Computational results comparing our approach against an exact algorithm are presented.