{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/metaheuristics-for-the-minimum-set-cover","title":"Metaheuristics for the Minimum Set Cover Problem: A Comparison","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2020-11-12","proceeding":"ECTA 2020 11","authors":["Lukas Rosenbauer","Helena Stegherr","Anthony Stein","Jörg Hähner"],"abstract":"The minimum set cover problem (MSCP) is one of the first NP-hard optimization problems discovered. Theoretically it has a bad worst case approximation ratio. As the MSCP turns out to appear in several real world\r\nproblems, various approaches exist where evolutionary algorithms and metaheuristics are utilized in order to\r\nachieve good average case results. This work is intended to revisit and compare current results regarding the\r\napplication of metaheuristics for the MSCP. Therefore, a recapitulation of the MSCP and its classification into\r\nthe class of NP-hard optimization problems are provided first. After an overview of notable approximation\r\nmethods, the focus is shifted towards a brief review of existing metaheuristics which were adapted for the\r\nMSCP. In order to allow for a targeted comparison of the existing algorithms, the theoretical worst case complexities in terms of the big O-notation are derived first. This is followed by an empirical study where the\r\nidentified metaheuristics are examined. Here we use Steiner triple systems, Beasley’s OR library, and introduce a new class of instances. Several of the considered approaches achieve close to optimal results. However,\r\nour analysis reveals significant differences in terms of runtime and shows that some approaches may even have\r\nexponential runtime.","url_abs":"https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346826681_Metaheuristics_for_the_Minimum_Set_Cover_Problem_A_Comparison","url_pdf":"https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346826681_Metaheuristics_for_the_Minimum_Set_Cover_Problem_A_Comparison","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"metaheuristics-for-the-minimum-set-cover","repo_url":"https://github.com/LagLukas/mscp","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"evolutionary-algorithms","task_name":"Evolutionary Algorithms"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}