TY - JOUR A2 - Wang, M. A2 - Buzna, L. A2 - Ekel, P. A2 - Mohan, C. AU - Bilal, Nehme AU - Galinier, Philippe AU - Guibault, Francois PY - 2013 DA - 2013/04/23 TI - A New Formulation of the Set Covering Problem for Metaheuristic Approaches SP - 203032 VL - 2013 AB - Two difficulties arise when solving the set covering problem (SCP) with metaheuristic approaches: solution infeasibility and set redundancy. In this paper, we first present a review and analysis of theheuristic approaches that have been used in the literature to address these difficulties. We then present a new formulation that can be used to solve the SCP as an unconstrained optimization problem and that eliminates the need to address the infeasibility and set redundancy issues. We show that all local optimums with respect to the new formulation and a 1-flip neighbourhood structure are feasible and free of redundant sets. In addition, we adapt an existing greedy heuristic for the SCP to the new formulation and compare the adapted heuristic to the original heuristic using 88 known test problems for the SCP. Computational results show that the adapted heuristic finds better results than the original heuristic on most of the test problems in shorter computation times. SN - null UR - https://doi.org/10.1155/2013/203032 DO - 10.1155/2013/203032 JF - ISRN Operations Research PB - Hindawi Publishing Corporation KW - ER -