Parallel Iterative.A * Search: An Admissible Distributed Heuristic Search Algorithm

In this paper, a distributed heuristic search algorithm is presented. We show that the algorithm is admissible and give an informal analysis of its load balancing, scalability, and speedup. A flow-shop scheduling problem has been implemented on a BBN Butterfly Multicomputer using up to 80 processors to empirically test this algorithm. From our experiments, this algorithm is capable of achieving almost linear speedup on a large number of processors with a relatively small problem size.