Enumeration of Circuits and Minimal Forbidden Sets

Abstract

In resource-constrained scheduling, it is sometimes important to know all inclusion-minimal subsets of jobs that must not be scheduled simultaneously. These so-called minimal forbidden sets are given implicitly by a linear inequality system, and can be interpreted more generally as the circuits of a particular independence system. We present several complexity results related to computation, enumeration, and counting of the circuits of an independence system. On this account, we also propose a backtracking algorithm that enumerates all minimal forbidden sets for resource constrained scheduling problems.