A new parallel breadth first tabu seach technique for solving production planning problems

This paper presents a new parallel breadth first oriented tabu search extension, which can be used to improve existing tabu search procedures for production planning problems. Especially it is shown that this distributed technique considerably improves existing efficient sequential procedures for a well-known assembly line balancing problem. Since this technique does not require any communication besides exchanging the solutions reached at the end of the computation, it can be installed on nearly every distributed system.