Set covering with almost consecutive ones property

In this paper we consider set covering problems with a coefficient matrix almost having the consecutive ones property, i.e., in many rows of the coefficient matrix, the ones appear consecutively. If this property holds for all rows it is well known that the set covering problem can be solved efficiently. For our case of almost consecutive ones we present a reformulation exploiting the consecutive ones structure to develop bounds and a branching scheme. Our approach has been tested on real-world data as well as on theoretical problem instances.