Application of Combinatorial Programming to a Class of All-Zero-One Integer Programming Problems

Problem-solving procedures based on the methods of combinatorial programming are presented for solving a class of integer programming problems in which all elements are zero or one. All of the procedures seek first a feasible solution and then successively better and better feasible solutions until ultimately one is discovered which is shown to be optimal. By representing the problem elements in a binary computer as bits in a word and employing logical “and” and “or” operations in the problem-solving process, a number of problems involving several hundred integer variables have been solved in a matter of seconds.