The Set-Partitioning Problem: Set Covering with Equality Constraints

This paper gives an enumerative algorithm for the set-partitioning problem, that is, the set-covering problem with equality constraints, and presents computational results for real and randomly generated problems. The fact that many problems can be solved more rapidly than the corresponding linear programs demonstrates the efficiency of the algorithm; for example, a randomly generated problem with 1,400 variables and 100 constraints was solved in 15 minutes.