Reduction and Efficient Solution of ILP Models of Mixed Hamming Packings Yielding Improved Upper Bounds

We consider mixed Hamming packings, addressing the maximal cardinality of codes with a minimum codeword Hamming distance. We do not rely on any algebraic structure of the alphabets. We extend known-integer linear programming models of the problem to be efficiently tractable using standard ILP solvers. This is achieved by adopting the concept of contact graphs from classical continuous sphere packing problems to the present discrete context, resulting in a reduction technique for the models which enables their efficient solution as well as their decomposition to smaller subproblems. Based on our calculations, we provide a systematic summary of all lower and upper bounds for packings in the smallest Hamming spaces. The known results are reproduced, with some bounds found to be sharp, and the upper bounds improved in some cases.