Constructive covers of a finite set

Abstract

Given positive integers $n,k$ with $k\leq n$, we consider the number of ways of choosing $k$ subsets of $\{1,\ldots,n\}$ in such a way that the union of these subsets gives $\{1,\ldots,n\}$ and they are not subsets of each other. We refer to such choices of sets as constructive $k$-covers and provide a semi-analytic summation formula to calculate the exact number of constructive $k$-covers of $\{1,\ldots,n\}$. Each term in the summation is the product of a new variant of Stirling numbers of the second kind, referred to as integrated Stirling numbers, and the cardinality of a certain set which we calculate by an optimization-based procedure with no-good cuts for binary variables.