Beam search for the longest common subsequence problem

The longest common subsequence problem is a classical string problem that concerns finding the common part of a set of strings. It has several important applications, for example, pattern recognition or computational biology. Most research efforts up to now have focused on solving this problem optimally. In comparison, only few works exist dealing with heuristic approaches. In this work we present a deterministic beam search algorithm. The results show that our algorithm outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches not only in solution quality but often also in computation time.