Branch and Bound Algorithm

Branch-and-bound is a method for solving optimization problems by breaking them down into smaller subproblems and using a bounding function to eliminate whole subproblems that provably cannot contain the optimal solution. It systematically enumerates candidate solutions as a rooted tree, checking each branch against upper and lower bounds on the optimal solution before exploring it further, and discarding any branch that cannot beat the best solution found so far. Ailsa Land and Alison Doig first proposed the method in 1960 while researching discrete programming at the London School of Economics, sponsored by British Petroleum. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/