Performance evaluation of parallel multithreaded A* heuristic search algorithm

Abstract

Heuristic search is used in many problems and applications, such as the 15 puzzle problem, the travelling salesman problem and web search engines. In this paper, the A* heuristic search algorithm is reconsidered by proposing a parallel generic approach based on multithreading for solving the 15 puzzle problem. Using multithreading, sequential computers are provided with virtual parallelization, yielding faster execution and easy communication. These advantageous features are provided through creating a dynamic number of concurrent threads at the run time of an application. The proposed approach is evaluated analytically and experimentally and compared with its sequential counterpart in terms of various performance metrics. It is revealed by the experimental results that multithreading is a viable approach for parallel A* heuristic search. For instance, it has been found that the parallel multithreaded A* heuristic search algorithm, in particular, outperforms the sequential approach in terms of time complexity and speedup.