OPMOS: Ordered Parallel Multi-Objective Shortest-Path

The Multi-Objective Shortest-Path (MOS) problem finds a set of Pareto-optimal solutions from a start node to a destination node in a multi-attribute graph. To solve the NP-hard MOS problem, the literature explores heuristic multi-objective A*-style algorithmic approaches. A generalized MOS algorithm maintains a "frontier" of partial paths at each node and performs ordered processing to ensure that Pareto-optimal paths are generated to reach the goal node. The algorithm becomes computationally intractable as the number of objectives increases due to a rapid increase in the non-dominated paths, and the concomitantly large increase in Pareto-optimal solutions. While prior works have focused on algorithmic methods to reduce the complexity, we tackle this challenge by exploiting parallelism using an algorithm-architecture approach. The key insight is that MOS algorithms rely on the ordered execution of partial paths to maintain high work efficiency. The OPMOS framework, proposed herein, unlocks ordered parallelism and efficiently exploits the concurrent execution of multiple paths in MOS. Experimental evaluation using the NVIDIA GH200 Superchip shows the performance scaling potential of OPMOS on work efficiency and parallelism using a real-world application to ship routing.