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arXiv · 2110.11697

An Efficient Branch-and-Bound Solver for Hitting Set

Thomas Bläsius·Tobias Friedrich·David Stangl·Christopher Weyand
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Abstract

The hitting set problem asks for a collection of sets over a universe $U$ to find a minimum subset of $U$ that intersects each of the given sets. It is NP-hard and equivalent to the problem set cover. We give a branch-and-bound algorithm to solve hitting set. Though it requires exponential time in the worst case, it can solve many practical instances from different domains in reasonable time. Our algorithm outperforms a modern ILP solver, the state-of-the-art for hitting set, by at least an order of magnitude on most instances.

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Thomas Bläsius, Tobias Friedrich, David Stangl, Christopher Weyand. 2021-10-22. An Efficient Branch-and-Bound Solver for Hitting Set. https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.11697

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