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Parallel A* for State-Space Search

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Handbook of Parallel Constraint Reasoning

Abstract

A* is a best-first search algorithm for finding optimal-cost paths in graphs. A* benefits significantly from parallelism because in many applications, A* is limited by memory usage, so distributed memory implementations of A* that use all of the aggregate memory on the cluster enable us to solve problems that can not be solved by serial, single-machine implementations. We survey approaches to parallel A*, focusing on decentralized approaches to A* which partition the state space among processors. We also survey approaches to parallel, limited-memory variants of A* such as parallel IDA*.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by JSPS KAKENHI grants 25330253 and 17K00296.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Alex Fukunaga & Yuu Jinnai

  2. IBM Research, Dublin, Ireland

    Adi Botea & Akihiro Kishimoto

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  1. Alex Fukunaga
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Correspondence to Alex Fukunaga .

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  1. Laboratoire d'informatique (LIX) de l'École polytechnique, Palaiseau, France

    Youssef Hamadi

  2. CRIL, CNRS UMR 8188, Université d'Artois, Lens, France

    Lakhdar Sais

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Fukunaga, A., Botea, A., Jinnai, Y., Kishimoto, A. (2018). Parallel A* for State-Space Search. In: Hamadi, Y., Sais, L. (eds) Handbook of Parallel Constraint Reasoning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63516-3_11

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