Chemical Reaction Optimization for the Set Covering Problem
This work addresses the set covering problem for researchers and practitioners in optimization, but it is incremental as it applies an existing metaheuristic to a known problem.
The paper tackled the set covering problem, a combinatorial optimization problem with many applications, by developing a chemical reaction optimization algorithm, which achieved outstanding performance compared to other heuristics and metaheuristics on benchmark instances.
The set covering problem (SCP) is one of the representative combinatorial optimization problems, having many practical applications. This paper investigates the development of an algorithm to solve SCP by employing chemical reaction optimization (CRO), a general-purpose metaheuristic. It is tested on a wide range of benchmark instances of SCP. The simulation results indicate that this algorithm gives outstanding performance compared with other heuristics and metaheuristics in solving SCP.