Chemical reaction optimization for the set covering problem

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.