  The minimum common string partition problem is an NP-hard combinatorial
optimization problem with applications in computational biology. In this work
we propose the first integer linear programming model for solving this problem.
Moreover, on the basis of the integer linear programming model we develop a
deterministic 2-phase heuristic which is applicable to larger problem
instances. The results show that provenly optimal solutions can be obtained for
problem instances of small and medium size from the literature by solving the
proposed integer linear programming model with CPLEX. Furthermore, new
best-known solutions are obtained for all considered problem instances from the
literature. Concerning the heuristic, we were able to show that it outperforms
heuristic competitors from the related literature.
