Construction of Mixed Covering Arrays Using a Combination of Simulated Annealing and Variable Neighborhood Search

The construction of Mixed Covering Arrays (MCA) with the minimum number of rows has been a problem faced in different ways. This paper aims to construct near optimal MCAs through a novel approach based on Simulated Annealing (SA) and Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS). The solution quality of the proposed algorithm was measured by solving two benchmarks and the obtained results show a significant quality improvement over the results of previously reported metaheuristics.