On a Variant of the Minimum Path Cover Problem in Acyclic Digraphs: Computational Complexity Results and Exact Method

ABSTRACT The Minimum Path Cover ( MPC ) problem consists of finding a minimum‐cardinality set of node‐disjoint paths that cover all nodes in a given graph. We explore a variant of the MPC problem on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) where, given a subset of arcs, each path within the MPC should contain at least one arc from this subset. We prove that the feasibility problem is strongly ‐hard on arbitrary DAGs, but the problem can be solved in polynomial time when the DAG is the transitive closure of a path. Given that the problem may not always be feasible, our solution focuses on covering a maximum number of nodes with a minimum number of node‐disjoint paths, such that each path includes at least one arc from the predefined subset of arcs. This paper introduces and investigates two integer programming formulations for this problem. We propose several valid inequalities to enhance the linear programming relaxations, employing them as cutting planes in a branch‐and‐cut approach. The procedure is implemented and tested on a wide range of instances, including real‐world instances derived from an airline crew scheduling problem, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.