A Heuristic for a Mixed Integer Program using the Characteristic Equation Approach

While most linear programming (LP) problems can be solved in polynomial time, pure and mixed integer problems are NP-hard and there are no known polynomial time algorithms to solve these problems. A characteristic equation (CE) was developed to solve a pure integer program (PIP). This paper presents a heuristic that generates a feasible solution along with the bounds for the NP-hard mixed integer program (MIP) model by solving the LP relaxation and the PIP, using the CE.