Incremental Processing Applied to Steinberg's Placement Procedure

In this paper we indicate how the concept of incremental processing was applied to Steinberg's procedure for the placement of modules on a board. In this procedure Munkres' algorithm is repeatedly used to solve linear assignment problems. We consider each assignment problem (matrix) to represent an incremental change with respect to the previous one, and present new techniques for solving a new assignment problem given the results of the previous one. We refer to this new algorithm as the Incremental Steinberg Algorithm. Experimental results indicate that this new algorithm produces equally good results as the classical technique but at a substantial reduction in CPU time.