WASET
	%0 Journal Article
	%A Miloš Šeda
	%D 2007
	%J International Journal of Computer and Information Engineering
	%B World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology
	%I Open Science Index 5, 2007
	%T Heuristic Set-Covering-Based Postprocessing for Improving the Quine-McCluskey Method
	%U https://publications.waset.org/pdf/4728
	%V 5
	%X Finding the minimal logical functions has important applications in the design of logical circuits. This task is solved by many different methods but, frequently, they are not suitable for a computer implementation. We briefly summarise the well-known Quine-McCluskey method, which gives a unique procedure of computing and thus can be simply implemented, but, even for simple examples, does not guarantee an optimal solution. Since the Petrick extension of the Quine-McCluskey method does not give a generally usable method for finding an optimum for logical functions with a high number of values, we focus on interpretation of the result of the Quine-McCluskey method and show that it represents a set covering problem that, unfortunately, is an NP-hard combinatorial problem. Therefore it must be solved by heuristic or approximation methods. We propose an approach based on genetic algorithms and show suitable parameter settings.

	%P 1307 - 1312