Journal of Operational Research and Its Applications ( Applied Mathematics ) - Lahijan Azad University

Set covering problem has many applications such as emergency systems, retailers’ facilities, hospitals, radar devices, and military logistics, and it is considered as Np-Hard problems. The goal of set covering problem is to find a subset such that :::::::::union::::::::: of the subset members covered the whole set. In this paper, we present a new heuristic algorithm to solve the set covering problem. In the heuristic algorithm, the amounts of improvement are calculated for any of vertices in the graph. Based on the improvement we consider vertices in the subset. The amounts of improvement updated in each iteration to find near optimal solution. A simulated annealing algorithm, which its parameters tuned with Taguchi method, is presented to compare with our suggested heuristic algorithm. The computational results show that the heuristic algorithm works better than the simulated annealing algorithm in both quality of solution, and time view.