A dynamic programming based reduction procedure for the multidimensional 0-1 knapsack problem

This paper presents a preprocessing procedure for the 0-1 multidimensional knapsack problem. First, a non-increasing sequence of upper bounds is generated by solving LP-relaxations. Then, a non-decreasing sequence of lower bounds is built using dynamic programming. The comparison of the two sequences allows either to prove that the best feasible solution obtained is optimal, or to fix a subset of variables to their optimal values. In addition, a heuristic solution is obtained. Computational experiments with a set of large-scale instances show the efficiency of our reduction scheme. Particularly, it is shown that our approach allows to reduce the CPU time of a leading commercial software. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.