| Article ID: | iaor20031216 |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Volume: | 53 |
| Issue: | 7 |
| Start Page Number: | 792 |
| End Page Number: | 799 |
| Publication Date: | Jul 2002 |
| Journal: | Journal of the Operational Research Society |
| Authors: | Haouari M., Chaouachi J.S. |
| Keywords: | combinatorial analysis |
We present a probabilistic greedy search method for combinatorial optimisation problems. This approach is implemented and evaluated for the Set Covering Problem and shown to yield a simple, robust, and quite fast heuristic. Tests performed on a large set of benchmark instances with up to 1000 rows and 10 000 columns show that the algorithm consistently yields near-optimal solutions.