Branch and bound (BB or B&B) is a general algorithm for finding optimal solutions of various optimization problems, especially in discrete and combinatorial optimization. A branch-and-bound algorithm consists of a systematic enumeration of all candidate solutions, where large subsets of fruitless candidates are discarded en masse, by using upper and lower estimated bounds of the quantity being optimized.
The method was first proposed by A. H. Land and A. G. Doig in 1960 for discrete programming.
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