An improved branch-and-bound algorithm for the test cover problem

Authors:
Torsten Fahle;Karsten Tiemann
Affiliations:
Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany;Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany
Venue:
WEA'05 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Experimental and Efficient Algorithms
Year:
2005

Citing 2
Cited 0

On the Approximability of the Minimum Test Collection Problem

ESA '01 Proceedings of the 9th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms
Branch-and-Bound Algorithms for the Test Cover Problem

ESA '02 Proceedings of the 10th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The test cover problem asks for the minimal number of tests needed to uniquely identify a disease, infection, etc. At ESA'02 a collection of branch-and-bound algorithms was proposed by [4]. Based on their work, we introduce several improvements that are compatible with all techniques described in [4]. We present a faster data structure, cost based variable fixing and adapt an upper bound heuristic. The resulting algorithm solves benchmark instances up to 10 times faster than the former approach and up to 100 times faster than a general MIP-solver.