Solution to the covering problem

This work is motivated by recent investigations that reveal the intractability of the covering problem. Current methods for solving this problem lack an explicit procedure. Therefore, they are of limited value. This work presents the steps for solving such problems using a novel algorithm. The search performance is better than that achieved in other works. Some numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the performance and to compare it with the performance of other methods. The proposed algorithm can be utilized to solve fuzzy relation equations that exhibit the zero-or-greatest property.