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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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A method to generate heating and cooling schedules based on data from connected thermostats

Internet-connected thermostats are a promising new source of temperature and operational data in homes because they record inside temperatures, setpoints, and HVAC runtimes every five minutes. Over 20 million Internet-connected thermostats have already been installed in American homes. Data from about 20,000 connected thermostats were collected and organized by climate zone, number of occupants, floor area, and day type. A method was developed to create up to 40 representative temperature schedules which, together, can more accurately capture the diversity of heating and cooling behaviors. These results are suitable for input into schedules for building energy simulation models. This information enables more realistic simulations of American heating and cooling behavior, leading to more accurate estimates of energy consumption and savings.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Measured and Modeled Vineyard Canopy Development and Water Use

Two publicly available applications relevant to vineyard irrigation management are described. OpenET is a satellite-based system that applies an ensemble of remote sensing methods to enable wide-area monitoring of evapotranspiration (ET) and related measures such as vegetation canopy development (via the NDVI spectral index). Data are freely available at one-quarter acre spatial resolution, and may be automatically aggregated to the individual block level. The satellite-based daily ET data were compared with in-situ eddy covariance measurements collected by micro-meteorological instrumentation in a Central Coast vineyard over a three-year period (2020-2022). Estimation uncertainties were reasonably consistent with prior reports for GRAPEX sites in the Central Valley and North Coast. The CropManage (CM) web application is a free software tool developed and operated U.C. Cooperative Extension for ET-based irrigation scheduling of major specialty crops. CM provides specific guidance for irrigation events in terms of irrigation system runtime. Applied water recommendations are based largely on estimated ET, derived from assumed canopy cover and associated crop coefficients, since the last irrigation or rainfall event. The application was recently adapted to vineyards by accounting for presence of winter/spring cover crop, and vine water stress imposed by regulated deficit irrigation. A 2022 field campaign involved 12 Central Coast and San Joaquin Valley commercial vineyards, and OpenET data were used to help evaluate CM output. Maximum percent vine cover was compared to estimates derived from average July satellite NDVI. The difference for 10 sites lacking midseason groundcover ranged from 0-7% between datasets with average agreement near 4%. Cumulative ET estimates agreed with OpenET to within 12% at the majority of sites, while larger discrepancies at the remaining sites may require additional data collection and analysis during the 2023 season. Satellite based systems such as OpenET have the potential to help parameterize CropManage and similar agricultural decision-support systems.

Measured↗

IRIS Reimagined: Advancements in Intelligent Runtime System for Task-Based Programming

Task-based programming models are gaining traction in scientific computing. IRIS is a portable runtime system that exploits multiple heterogeneous programming systems and can discover available resources and manage multiple diverse programming systems (e.g., CUDA, Hexagon, HIP, Level Zero, OpenCL, and OpenMP) simultaneously. It accounts for the constraints of task dependencies and provides customizable scheduling policies to map those tasks to heterogeneous devices. In this paper, we present new capabilities added to IRIS to improve its portability for heterogeneous programming, build-friendliness, and performance efficiency. The new additions include vendor-specific kernel support, a runtime system with a foreign function interface to eliminate writing wrapper or boilerplate code for heterogeneous kernels, an easy-to-use and configurable CMake-based build environment, automatic and efficient data transfers and orchestration, and the Hunter and DAGGER toolchains to evaluate IRIS’s task scheduling algorithms.

Miniskar, Narasinga Rao↗

Mission Data System Java Edition Version 7

The Mission Data System framework defines closed-loop control system abstractions from State Analysis including interfaces for state variables, goals, estimators, and controllers that can be adapted to implement a goal-oriented control system. The framework further provides an execution environment that includes a goal scheduler, execution engine, and fault monitor that support the expression of goal network activity plans. Using these frameworks, adapters can build a goal-oriented control system where activity coordination is verified before execution begins (plan time), and continually during execution. Plan failures including violations of safety constraints expressed in the plan can be handled through automatic re-planning. This version optimizes a number of key interfaces and features to minimize dependencies, performance overhead, and improve reliability. Fault diagnosis and real-time projection capabilities are incorporated. This version enhances earlier versions primarily through optimizations and quality improvements that raise the technology readiness level. Goals explicitly constrain system states over explicit time intervals to eliminate ambiguity about intent, as compared to command-oriented control that only implies persistent intent until another command is sent. A goal network scheduling and verification process ensures that all goals in the plan are achievable before starting execution. Goal failures at runtime can be detected (including predicted failures) and handled by adapted response logic. Responses can include plan repairs (try an alternate tactic to achieve the same goal), goal shedding, ignoring the fault, cancelling the plan, or safing the system.

Reinholtz, William K.↗

The SGI/Cray T3E: Experiences and Insights

The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is home to the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world, a 1024 processor SGI/Cray T3E-600. The original 512 processor system was placed at Goddard in March, 1997 as part of a cooperative agreement between the High Performance Computing and Communications Program's Earth and Space Sciences Project (ESS) and SGI/Cray Research. The goal of this system is to facilitate achievement of the Project milestones of 10, 50 and 100 GFLOPS sustained performance on selected Earth and space science application codes. The additional 512 processors were purchased in March, 1998 by the NASA Earth Science Enterprise for the NASA Seasonal to Interannual Prediction Project (NSIPP). These two "halves" still operate as a single system, and must satisfy the unique requirements of both aforementioned groups, as well as guest researchers from the Earth, space, microgravity, manned space flight and aeronautics communities. Few large scalable parallel systems are configured for capability computing, so models are hard to find. This unique environment has created a challenging system administration task, and has yielded some insights into the supercomputing needs of the various NASA Enterprises, as well as insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the T3E architecture and software. The T3E is a distributed memory system in which the processing elements (PE's) are connected by a low latency, high bandwidth bidirectional 3-D torus. Due to the focus on high speed communication between PE's, the T3E requires PE's to be allocated contiguously per job. Further, jobs will only execute on the user specified number of PE's and PE timesharing is possible but impractical. With a highly varied job mix in both size and runtime of jobs, the resulting scenario is PE fragmentation and an inability to achieve near 100% utilization. SGI/Cray has provided several scheduling and configuration tools to minimize the impact of fragmentation. These tools include PScheD (the political scheduler), GRM (the global resource manager) and NQE (the Network Queuing Environment). Features and impact of these tools will be discussed, as will resulting performance and utilization data. As a distributed memory system, the T3E is designed to be programmed through explicit message passing. Consequently, certain assumptions related to code design are made by the operating system (UNICOS/mk) and its scheduling tools. With the exception of HPF, which does run on the T3E, however poorly, alternative programming styles have the potential to impact the T3E in unexpected and undesirable ways. Several examples will be presented (preceeded with the disclaimer, "Don't try this at home! Violators will be prosecuted!")

Bernard, Lisa Hamet↗

Elastic distributed training with fast convergence and efficient resource utilization

Distributed learning is now routinely conducted on cloud as well as dedicated clusters. Training with elastic resources brings new challenges and design choices. Prior studies focus on runtime performance and assume a static algorithmic behavior. In this work, by analyzing the impact of of resource scaling on convergence, we introduce schedules for synchronous stochastic gradient descent that proactively adapt the number of learners to reduce training time and improve convergence. Our approach no longer assumes a constant number of processors throughout training. In our experiment, distributed stochastic gradient descent with dynamic schedules and reduction momentum achieves better convergence and significant speedups over prior static ones. Numerous distributed training jobs running on cloud may benefit from our approach.

Cong, Guojing↗

CIFO 3.0

The Ada Runtime Environment Working Group has, since 1985, developed and published the Catalog of Interface Features and Options (CFIO) for Ada runtime environments. These interfaces, expressed in legal Ada, provide 'hooks' into the runtime system to export both functionality and enhanced performance beyond that of 'vanilla' Ada implementations. Such enhancements include high- and low-level scheduling control, asynchronous communications facilities, predictable storage management facilities, and fast interrupt response. CIFO 3.0 represents the latest release, which incorporates the efforts of the European real time community as well as new interfaces and expansions of previous catalog entries. This presentation will give both an overview of the Catalog's contents and an 'insider's' view of the Catalog as a whole.

Rogers, Pat↗

Task scheduling in dataflow computer architectures

Dataflow computers provide a platform for the solution of a large class of computational problems, which includes digital signal processing and image processing. Many typical applications are represented by a set of tasks which can be repetitively executed in parallel as specified by an associated dataflow graph. Research in this area aims to model these architectures, develop scheduling procedures, and predict the transient and steady state performance. Researchers at NASA have created a model and developed associated software tools which are capable of analyzing a dataflow graph and predicting its runtime performance under various resource and timing constraints. These models and tools were extended and used in this work. Experiments using these tools revealed certain properties of such graphs that require further study. Specifically, the transient behavior at the beginning of the execution of a graph can have a significant effect on the steady state performance. Transformation and retiming of the application algorithm and its initial conditions can produce a different transient behavior and consequently different steady state performance. The effect of such transformations on the resource requirements or under resource constraints requires extensive study. Task scheduling to obtain maximum performance (based on user-defined criteria), or to satisfy a set of resource constraints, can also be significantly affected by a transformation of the application algorithm. Since task scheduling is performed by heuristic algorithms, further research is needed to determine if new scheduling heuristics can be developed that can exploit such transformations. This work has provided the initial development for further long-term research efforts. A simulation tool was completed to provide insight into the transient and steady state execution of a dataflow graph. A set of scheduling algorithms was completed which can operate in conjunction with the modeling and performance tools previously developed. Initial studies on the performance of these algorithms were done to examine the effects of application algorithm transformations as measured by such quantities as number of processors, time between outputs, time between input and output, communication time, and memory size.

Katsinis, Constantine↗

Improvements to Integrated Tradespace Analysis of Communications Architectures (ITACA) Network Loading Analysis Tool

NASA's SCENIC project aims to simplify and reduce the cost of space mission planning by replicating the analysis capabilities of commercially licensed software which are integrated with relevant analysis parameters specific to SCaN assets and SCaN supported user missions. SCENIC differs from current tools that perform similar analyses in that it 1) does not require any licensing fees, 2) will provide an all-in-one package for various analysis capabilities that normally requires add-ons or multiple tools to complete. As part of SCENIC's capabilities, the ITACA network loading analysis tool will be responsible for assessing the loading on a given network architecture and generating a network service schedule. ITACA will allow users to evaluate the quality of service of a given network architecture and determine whether or not the architecture will satisfy the mission's requirements. ITACA is currently under development, and the following improvements were made during the fall of 2017: optimization of runtime, augmentation of network asset pre-service configuration time, augmentation of Brent's method of root finding, augmentation of network asset FOV restrictions, augmentation of mission lifetimes, and the integration of a SCaN link budget calculation tool. The improvements resulted in (a) 25% reduction in runtime, (b) more accurate contact window predictions when compared to STK(Registered Trademark) contact window predictions, and (c) increased fidelity through the use of specific SCaN asset parameters.

analysis↗

Scheduling and Performance of Asynchronous Tasks in Fortran 2018 with FEATS

Most parallel scientific programs contain compiler directives (pragmas) such as those from OpenMP (Hermanns in Parallel programming in Fortran 95 using openMP, 2002. School of Aeronautical Engineering, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, España, 2011), explicit calls to runtime library procedures such as those implementing the Message Passing Interface (MPI) (in A message-passing interface standard version 4.0, 2021. https://www.mpi-forum.org/docs/mpi-4.0/mpi40-report.pdf), or compiler-specific language extensions such as those provided by CUDA (Ruetsch and Fatica in CUDA Fortran for scientists and engineers: best practices for efficient CUDA Fortran programming, Elsevier, 2013). By contrast, the recent Fortran standards empower developers to express parallel algorithms without directly referencing lower-level parallel programming models (Numrich in Parallel programming with co-arrays, CRC Press, 2018, and Curcic in Modern Fortran: building efficient parallel applications, Manning Publications, 2020). Fortran’s parallel features place the language within the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) class of programming models. When writing programs that exploit data parallelism, application developers often find it straightforward to develop custom parallel algorithms. Problems involving complex, heterogeneous, staged calculations, however, pose much greater challenges. Such applications require careful coordination of tasks in a manner that respects dependencies prescribed by a directed acyclic graph. When rolling one’s own solution proves difficult, extending a customizable framework becomes attractive. Further, the paper presents the design, implementation, and use of the Framework for Extensible Asynchronous Task Scheduling (FEATS), which we believe to be the first task scheduling tool written in modern Fortran. We describe the benefits and compromises associated with choosing Fortran as the implementation language, and we propose ways in which future Fortran standards can best support the use case in this paper.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

CALORIE: A Constraint Language and Optimizing Runtime for Exascale Power Management (Final Report)

This final technical report summarizes the key accomplishments on the CALORIE project, a DOE Early Career award received by PI Henry Hoffmann at the University of Chicago. CALORIE’s main goal was to create principled methodologies, tools, and practices to help scientists and high-performance computing (HPC) operators maximize the performance and insights obtained from scientific computing applications in the face of exascale power constraints. The project accomplished these goals by completing the following objectives: • Designing a language for describing application goals (including constraints and objectives) and system capabilities. The application goals will include things like which simulations or simulations plus in situ analysis will be run together, what the power constraints are, and what requirements there are for in situ analysis (for example, a desired frame rate for visualization). The system capabilities include all components that can be adjusted to tradeoff power and performance. • Designing a runtime system that takes specified goals and capabilities and dynamically determines what capabilities to use to meet the goals. This runtime adapts to changes in goals, application behavior, or available capabilities to automatically maintain the goals despite unexpected disturbances. • Developing a foundational understanding of how power constraints affect the problem of scheduling applications in large-scale systems. This report provides an overview of the accomplishments related to each of these key objectives.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Using containers to speed up development, to run integration tests and to teach about distributed systems

GlideinWMS is a workload manager provisioning resources for many experiments including CMS and DUNE. The software is distributed both as native packages and specialized production containers. Following an approach used in other communities like web development we built our workspaces, system-like containers to ease development and testing. Developers can change the source tree or check out a different branch and quickly reconfigure the services to see the effect of their changes. In this paper, we’ll talk about what differentiates workspaces from other containers. We’ll describe our base system composed of three containers. A one-node cluster including a compute element and a batch system. A GlideinWMS Factory controlling pilot jobs. And a scheduler and Frontend, to submit jobs and provision resources. Additional containers can be used for optional components. This system can easily run on a laptop and we’ll share our evaluation of different container runtimes, with an eye for ease of use and performance. Finally, we’ll talk about our experience as developers and with students. The GlideinWMS workspaces are easily integrated with IDEs like VS Code, simplifying debugging and allowing development and testing of the system also when offline. They simplified the training and onboarding of new team members and Summer interns. And they were useful in workshops where students could have first-hand experience with the mechanisms and components that, in production, run millions of jobs.

Mambelli, Marco↗

Using Containers to Speed Up Development, to Run Integration Tests and to Teach About Distributed Systems

GlideinWMS is a workload manager provisioning resources for many experiments, including CMS and DUNE. The software is distributed both as native packages and specialized production containers. Following an approach used in other communities like web development, we built our workspaces, system-like containers to ease development and testing. Developers can change the source tree or check out a different branch and quickly reconfigure the services to see the effect of their changes. In this paper, we will talk about what differentiates workspaces from other containers. We will describe our base system, composed of three containers: a one-node cluster including a compute element and a batch system, a GlideinWMS Factory controlling pilot jobs, and a scheduler and Frontend to submit jobs and provision resources. Additional containers can be used for optional components. This system can easily run on a laptop, and we will share our evaluation of different container runtimes, with an eye for ease of use and performance. Finally, we will talk about our experience as developers and with students. The GlideinWMS workspaces are easily integrated with IDEs like VS Code, simplifying debugging and allowing development and testing of the system even when offline. They simplified the training and onboarding of new team members and summer interns. And they were useful in workshops where students could have first-hand experience with the mechanisms and components that, in production, run millions of jobs.

Mambelli, Marco [Fermilab] (ORCID:0000000294892681↗

Mobile Agents: A Distributed Voice-Commanded Sensory and Robotic System for Surface EVA Assistance

A model-based, distributed architecture integrates diverse components in a system designed for lunar and planetary surface operations: spacesuit biosensors, cameras, GPS, and a robotic assistant. The system transmits data and assists communication between the extra-vehicular activity (EVA) astronauts, the crew in a local habitat, and a remote mission support team. Software processes ("agents"), implemented in a system called Brahms, run on multiple, mobile platforms, including the spacesuit backpacks, all-terrain vehicles, and robot. These "mobile agents" interpret and transform available data to help people and robotic systems coordinate their actions to make operations more safe and efficient. Different types of agents relate platforms to each other ("proxy agents"), devices to software ("comm agents"), and people to the system ("personal agents"). A state-of-the-art spoken dialogue interface enables people to communicate with their personal agents, supporting a speech-driven navigation and scheduling tool, field observation record, and rover command system. An important aspect of the engineering methodology involves first simulating the entire hardware and software system in Brahms, and then configuring the agents into a runtime system. Design of mobile agent functionality has been based on ethnographic observation of scientists working in Mars analog settings in the High Canadian Arctic on Devon Island and the southeast Utah desert. The Mobile Agents system is developed iteratively in the context of use, with people doing authentic work. This paper provides a brief introduction to the architecture and emphasizes the method of empirical requirements analysis, through which observation, modeling, design, and testing are integrated in simulated EVA operations.

Clancey, William J.↗

Encoding trade-offs and design toolkits in quantum algorithms for discrete optimization: coloring, routing, scheduling, and other problems

Challenging combinatorial optimization problems are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Several quantum methods for optimization have recently been developed, in different settings including both exact and approximate solvers. Addressing this field of research, this manuscript has three distinct purposes. First, we present an intuitive method for synthesizing and analyzing discrete (i.e., integer-based) optimization problems, wherein the problem and corresponding algorithmic primitives are expressed using a discrete quantum intermediate representation (DQIR) that is encoding-independent. This compact representation often allows for more efficient problem compilation, automated analyses of different encoding choices, easier interpretability, more complex runtime procedures, and richer programmability, as compared to previous approaches, which we demonstrate with a number of examples. Second, we perform numerical studies comparing several qubit encodings; the results exhibit a number of preliminary trends that help guide the choice of encoding for a particular set of hardware and a particular problem and algorithm. Our study includes problems related to graph coloring, the traveling salesperson problem, factory/machine scheduling, financial portfolio rebalancing, and integer linear programming. Third, we design low-depth graph-derived partial mixers (GDPMs) up to 16-level quantum variables, demonstrating that compact (binary) encodings are more amenable to QAOA than previously understood. We expect this toolkit of programming abstractions and low-level building blocks to aid in designing quantum algorithms for discrete combinatorial problems.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Optimizing Performance on Trinity Utilizing Machine Learning, Proxy Applications and Scheduling Priorities

The sheer number of nodes continues to increase in today’s supercomputers, the first half of Trinity alone contains more than 9400 compute nodes. Since the speed of today’s clusters are limited by the slowest nodes, it more important than ever to identify slow nodes, improve their performance if it can be done, and assure minimal usage of slower nodes during performance critical runs. This is an ongoing maintenance task that occurs on a regular basis and, therefore, it is important to minimize the impact upon its users by assessing and addressing slow performing nodes and mitigating their consequences while minimizing down time. These issues can be solved, in large part, through a systematic application of fast running hardware assessment tests, the application of Machine Learning, and making use of performance data to increase efficiency of large clusters. Proxy applications utilizing both MPI and OpenMP were developed to produce data as a substitute for long runtime applications to evaluate node performance. Machine learning is applied to identify underperforming nodes, and policies are being discussed to both minimize the impact of underperforming nodes and increase the efficiency of the system. In this paper, I will describe the process used to produce quickly performing proxy tests, consider various methods to isolate the outliers, and produce ordered lists for use in scheduling to accomplish this task.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

matsim-agents v1.0

matsim-agents is a multi-agent AI framework for atomistic materials simulation and discovery. It orchestrates large language models (LLMs), machine-learned interatomic potentials (MLIPs), and DFT codes into a single agentic loop running on laptops and DOE leadership-class supercomputers. MULTI-AGENT ORCHESTRATION A LangGraph state machine with three nodes: a Planner that converts a natural-language research objective into structured tasks; an Executor that dispatches atomistic tools and loops until the queue is empty; and an Analyst that summarizes results into a human-readable report. State is checkpointed after every step and human-in-the-loop gates can be inserted at any edge. HYPOTHESIS-DRIVEN DISCOVERY CHAT An interactive REPL (matsim-agents chat) that couples LLM dialogue with atomistic simulation. Chemical formulas are automatically detected in conversation turns and trigger a full crystal-phase exploration: structure generation → relaxation → stability scoring → result injection back into the conversation, creating a closed hypothesis-refinement loop. CRYSTAL PHASE ENUMERATION Given a composition, the phase explorer enumerates prototypes by stoichiometry: elemental (fcc/bcc/hcp/sc/diamond), binary 1:1 (rocksalt/CsCl/zincblende/ wurtzite/fluorite/rutile), ternary 1:1:3 (cubic perovskite), ternary 1:2:4 (perovskite + spinel), quaternary 1:1:2:6 (Fm-3m double perovskite). 2-D prototypes (graphene, h-BN, MoS2 2H/1T) and multilayer stacking are also supported via --include-2d and --num-layers. SUPERCELL GENERATION AND SITE DECORATION Auto-tiling to a minimum atom count (--min-atoms), explicit NxNxN tiling (--supercell), symmetry-distinct site decorations (--n-orderings), and isotropic lattice-scale sweeps (--lattice-scales) for volume bracketing. MLFF RELAXATION AND STABILITY SCORING HydraGNN (multi-headed GNN) drives structure relaxation via ASE with FIRE, BFGS, or BFGSLineSearch. Stability output: delta-E/atom ranking across phases and a max-residual-force dynamical-stability proxy. Other MLIPs (MACE, NequIP, Orb) can be plugged in through the same interface. DFT BACKENDS Quantum ESPRESSO pw.x and VASP 6.6 are first-class labellers. Both have validated GPU builds and SLURM/PBS launchers for three DOE platforms: Frontier (AMD MI250X, ROCm), Aurora (Intel PVC, oneAPI), Perlmutter (NVIDIA A100, CUDA). QE produces ~100 binaries (pw.x, ph.x, epw.x, ...). VASP supports scf, relax, vc-relax, and vc-relax-shape run types. ACTIVE-LEARNING LOOP matsim-agents al run CONFIG.yaml drives an iterative HydraGNN-DFT loop: MD generates candidates → ensemble/MC-dropout uncertainty selects the most informative → DFT labels them in parallel inside one allocation → dataset grows → HydraGNN retrains → repeat. DFT backend is a single YAML toggle (dft.backend: vasp | qe). LLM-generated seed structures are supported (no curated POSCAR library needed). Config uses ${VAR}, ${VAR:-default}, ${VAR:?msg} shell-style substitution for cross-user/cross-site portability. LLM BACKENDS Ollama (local, default), vLLM (HPC multi-GPU serving), OpenAI, Anthropic, HuggingFace Transformers+Accelerate. Selected at runtime via flag or env var with no code changes. HPC PORTABILITY Same Python entry points run on Frontier (ROCm 7.2), Aurora (oneAPI), and Perlmutter (CUDA 12). DFT and ML stacks are never co-loaded in the same shell; they couple through the scheduler and filesystem. Advanced multi-node launchers (serve, discovery-chat, single-relaxation, active-learning, QE warm-start) are provided for all three platforms. CODABENCH COMPETITION BUNDLE A self-contained benchmark: 159 atomistic test structures across 11 material classes, 5 tasks (formation energy, forces, ML relaxation, AI-DFT relaxation, phase stability ranking), public/private leaderboard split (30/70), and four ready-to-run baselines: MACE-MP-0, HydraGNN, UMA, AllScAIP.

Lupo Pasini, Massimiliano [Oak Ridge National Labo↗

Massively Parallel Dantzig-Wolfe Decomposition Applied to Traffic Flow Scheduling

Optimal scheduling of air traffic over the entire National Airspace System is a computationally difficult task. To speed computation, Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition is applied to a known linear integer programming approach for assigning delays to flights. The optimization model is proven to have the block-angular structure necessary for Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition. The subproblems for this decomposition are solved in parallel via independent computation threads. Experimental evidence suggests that as the number of subproblems/threads increases (and their respective sizes decrease), the solution quality, convergence, and runtime improve. A demonstration of this is provided by using one flight per subproblem, which is the finest possible decomposition. This results in thousands of subproblems and associated computation threads. This massively parallel approach is compared to one with few threads and to standard (non-decomposed) approaches in terms of solution quality and runtime. Since this method generally provides a non-integral (relaxed) solution to the original optimization problem, two heuristics are developed to generate an integral solution. Dantzig-Wolfe followed by these heuristics can provide a near-optimal (sometimes optimal) solution to the original problem hundreds of times faster than standard (non-decomposed) approaches. In addition, when massive decomposition is employed, the solution is shown to be more likely integral, which obviates the need for an integerization step. These results indicate that nationwide, real-time, high fidelity, optimal traffic flow scheduling is achievable for (at least) 3 hour planning horizons.

Rios, Joseph Lucio↗