Heuristic approach to binate covering problem

Abstract

Covering problem is a problem of extraction of a minimum cost subset from a given set that satisfies certain constraints expressed as a Boolean formula in conjunctive normal form. This problem is NP-hard, heuristic methods are thus of interest. The authors present two heuristic methods to finding a nearly minimal solution and compare them to each other. The authors derive the asymptotic complexity of the presented methods and report some computational results obtained for a number of randomly generated covering problems.<>