Exact and approximate USCP with branch and bound

We propose a parallel solver for the unicost set covering problem based on branch and bound approach. The main contributions of this algorithm lay in its fast parallel execution and the ability to work in approximate mode. We demonstrate the proposed approach on the problem instances from GECCO 2021 unicost set covering competition. To tackle the presented problem instances of varying difficulty, we use an automatic tuning of the algorithm's parameters. The results show all the instances can be solved but the performance remains weak on large instances.