Computing minimal hitting sets (also known as set covers) for a collection of sets is an important problem in many domains (e.g., model/reasoning-based fault diagnosis). Being an NP-Hard problem, exhaustive algorithms are usually prohibitive for real-world, often large, problems. In practice, the usage of heuristic based approaches trade-off completeness for time efficiency. An example of such heuristic approaches is Staccato, which was proposed in the context of reasoning-based fault localization. In this paper, we propose an efficient distributed algorithm, dubbed MHS2, that renders the sequential search algorithm Staccato suitable to distributed, Map-Reduce environments. The results show that MHS2 scales to larger systems (when compared to Staccato), while entailing either marginal or small runtime overhead.
10.1007/978-3-642-39955-8_3