RELAXATION HEURISTICS FOR THE SET COVERING PROBLEM( the 50th Anniversary of the Operations Research Society of Japan)

Abstract

The set covering problem (SCP) is one of representative combinatorial optimization problems, which has many practical applications. The continuous development of mathematical programming has derived a number of impressive heuristic algorithms as well as exact branch-and-bound algorithms, which can solve huge SCP instances of bus, railway and airline crew scheduling problems. We survey heuristic algorithms for SCP focusing mainly on contributions of mathematical programming techniques to heuristics, and illustrate their performance through experimental analysis.