Jose Torres-Jimenez
CINVESTAV-Research 3C, Mexico

Title:
A survey of Covering Arrays

Abstract:
A covering arrays denoted by CA(N; t, k, v) is a matrix of N rows and k columns, where each element of the matrix take values from {0,1,…,v-1}; and the matrix satisfies that each subset of t columns contains at least once each combination of v^t.
The problem of constructing optimal covering arrays (CA) is a hard combinatorial optimization problem. An optimal CA has the minimum number of rows (N) given t, k, and v.
The covering arrays were used successfully in many areas when it is desired to minimize the number of experiments (N) to obtain some result, controlling some variables (k); for instance they were used in drug screening, agriculture planning, and bioinformatics.
The area in which CA were successfully used extensively is software testing, in software testing the CA were used to construct functional test suites of minimal size.
In this talk a survey of parallel and sequential methods to construct CA will be given. The overview covers algebraic, greedy, metaheuristic,exact, and transforming methods to obtain CA.
The talk will be concluded presenting impressive results of using parallel computing to construct thousands of improved CA.

Short Bio:
Dr. Jose Torres-Jimenez is a researcher at CINVESTAV-Tamaulipas (a leader research institution in Mexico). He has: coauthored 5 books; written more than sixty refereed papers; formed more than 60 professionals at graduate level; and developed many projects for the industry.  His working on covering arrays starts ten years ago. Dr. Torres-Jimenez is well known for his original developments to construct best-known covering arrays. His homepage is http://www.tamps.cinvestav.mx/~jtj, and his email is: jtj@cinvestav.mx

Website:
http://www.tamps.cinvestav.mx/~jtj