Parallel dynamic water supply scheduling in a cluster of computers

The parallelization of complex planning and control problems arising in diverse application areas in the industrial, services and commercial environments not only allows the determination of control variables in the required times but also improves the performance of the control procedure as more processors are involved in the execution of the parallel program. In this paper we describe a scheduling application in a water supply network to demonstrate the benefits of parallel processing. The procedure we propose combines dynamic programming with genetic algorithms and time series prediction in order to solve problems in which decisions are made in stages, and the states and control belong to a continuous space. Taking into account the computational complexity of these applications and the time constraints that are usually imposed, the procedure has been implemented by a parallel program in a cluster of computers, an inexpensive and widely extended platform that can make parallelism a practical means of tackling complex problems in many different environments. Copyright  2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.