  In the minimum common string partition (MCSP) problem two related input
strings are given. "Related" refers to the property that both strings consist
of the same set of letters appearing the same number of times in each of the
two strings. The MCSP seeks a minimum cardinality partitioning of one string
into non-overlapping substrings that is also a valid partitioning for the
second string. This problem has applications in bioinformatics e.g. in
analyzing related DNA or protein sequences. For strings with lengths less than
about 1000 letters, a previously published integer linear programming (ILP)
formulation yields, when solved with a state-of-the-art solver such as CPLEX,
satisfactory results. In this work, we propose a new, alternative ILP model
that is compared to the former one. While a polyhedral study shows the linear
programming relaxations of the two models to be equally strong, a comprehensive
experimental comparison using real-world as well as artificially created
benchmark instances indicates substantial computational advantages of the new
formulation.
