A greedy algorithm to construct covering arrays using a graph representation

Abstract Combinatorial interaction testing is an effective method to assess the functionality of hardware and software components, and usually, covering arrays (CAs) and mixed covering arrays (MCAs) are used as test-suites. The main contributions of this work are the development of a graph representation for the problem of constructing CAs and MCAs, and the creation of a competitive greedy algorithm to solve the construction problem of CAs and MCAs in the graph domain. The representation that we introduce in this paper is denoted as Coverage in Nodes (CN) and our algorithm is called Graph Based Greedy Algorithm (GBGA). We have compared the performance of GBGA with other state-of-the-art greedy algorithm regarding the construction of CAs and MCAs. It is remarkable to note that we were able to define 13 new upper bounds for MCAs.

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