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| | Branch and Bound |
 | | There must also be a way to compute an upper bound (feasible solution) for at least some instances; for practical purposes, it should be possible to compute upper bounds for some set of nontrivial feasible regions. |
 | | Otherwise, the feasible region is divided into two or more regions, each strict subregions of the original, which together cover the whole feasible region; ideally, these subproblems partition the feasible region. |
 | | Since it is feasible, it can be used to prune the rest of the tree: if the lower bound for a node exceeds the best known feasible solution, no globally optimal solution can exist in the subspace of the feasible region represented by the node. |
| www.cs.sandia.gov /opt/survey/branch-and-bound.html (318 words) |
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