Exact and Heuristic Approaches to the Maximum Capacity Representatives Problem

Abstract

This paper approaches the problem of finding the system of representatives of a family of disjoint sets. To solve this problem, three methods were used: integer programming, branch-and-bound, and the BRKGA metaheuristic. We observed that, in randomly generated instances, the branch-and-bound algorithm was the best exact method but it was surpassed by BRKGA for large instances.