Time-critical testing and search problems
Alessandro Agnetis, Ben Hermans, Roel Leus, and Salim Rostami

TL;DR
This paper studies time-critical testing and search problems involving limited resources and deadlines, demonstrating their NP-hardness, proposing solution methods, and empirically evaluating their effectiveness in various scenarios.
Contribution
It introduces generalized time-critical testing and search problems, develops solution approaches including mixed integer programming and local search, and provides extensive computational analysis.
Findings
Assignment-based formulation outperforms partial-order for testing
Partial-order-based formulation is better for search problems
Local search method finds near-optimal solutions efficiently
Abstract
This paper introduces a problem in which the state of a system needs to be determined through costly tests of its components by a limited number of testing units and before a given deadline. We also consider a closely related search problem in which there are multiple searchers to find a target before a given deadline. These natural generalizations of the classical sequential testing problem and search problem are applicable in a wide range of time-critical operations such as machine maintenance, diagnosing a patient, and new product development. We show that both problems are NP-hard, develop a pseudo-polynomial dynamic program for the special case of two time slots, and describe a partial-order-based as well as an assignment-based mixed integer program for the general case. Based on extensive computational experiments, we find that the assignment-based formulation performs better than…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
