Construct, Merge, Solve and Adapt: Application to the Repetition-Free Longest Common Subsequence Problem

Abstract

In this paper we present the application of a recently proposed, general, algorithm for combinatorial optimization to the repetition-free longest common subsequence problem. The applied algorithm, which is labelled Construct, Merge, Solve & Adapt, generates sub-instances based on merging the solution components found in randomly constructed solutions. These sub-instances are subsequently solved by means of an exact solver. Moreover, the considered sub-instances are dynamically changing due to adding new solution components at each iteration, and removing existing solution components on the basis of indicators about their usefulness. The results of applying this algorithm to the repetition-free longest common subsequence problem show that the algorithm generally outperforms competing approaches from the literature. Moreover, they show that the algorithm is competitive with CPLEX for small and medium size problem instances, whereas it outperforms CPLEX for larger problem instances.

This work was supported by project TIN2012-37930-C02-02 (Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitiveness, FEDER funds from the European Union) and project SGR 2014-1034 (AGAUR, Generalitat de Catalunya). Additionally, Christian Blum acknowledges support from IKERBASQUE. Our experiments have been executed in the High Performance Computing environment managed by RDlab (http://rdlab.cs.upc.edu) and we would like to thank them for their support.