In this paper, we study the Exact Subset MultiCover problem (or ESM), which can be seen as an extension of the well-known Set Cover problem. Let (U,f) be a multiset built from set U={e1,e2,…,em} and function f:U→N⁎. ESM is defined as follows: given (U,f) and a collection S={S1,S2,…,Sn} of n subsets of U, is it possible to find a multiset (S′,g) with S′={S1′,S2′,…,Sn′} and g:S′→N, such that (i) Si′⊆Si for every 1≤i≤n, and (ii) each element of U appears as many times in (U,f) as in (S′,g)? We study this problem under an algorithmic viewpoint and provide diverse complexity results such as polynomial cases, NP-hardness proofs and FPT algorithms. We also study two variants of ESM: (i) Exclusive Exact Subset MultiCover (EESM), which asks that each element of U appears in exactly one subset Si′ of S′; (ii) Maximum Exclusive Exact Subset MultiCover (Max-EESM), an optimization version of EESM, which asks that a maximum number of elements of U appear in exactly one subset Si′ of S′. For both variants, we provide several complexity results; in particular we present a 2-approximation algorithm for Max-EESM, that we prove to be tight. For these three problems, we also provide an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation.
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