Sharp covering of a module by cyclic submodules (Q2250937)

Let \(A\) be a finite commutative ring with identity. A subset \(H\) of the \(A\)-module \(A^n\) is called an \(R\)-short covering of \(A^n\) if every element of this module can be written as a sum of a multiple of an element in \(H\) and an \(A\)-linear combination with at most \(R\) canonical vectors, that is, for \(v\in A^n\), there exists \(h \in H\) and there exist scalars \(\alpha,\alpha_1,\dots,\alpha_R\in A\) such that \(v = \alpha h +\sum_{i=1}^{R}\alpha_{i} e_{j_{i}}\) where \(\left\{e_1,...,e_n \right\}\) denotes the canonical base of \(A^n\). Let \(c(A, n, R)\) be the minimum cardinality of an \(R\)-short covering of \(A^n\). In this paper, the authors computed the numbers \(c(A, n, 0)\) when \(A\) is a direct product of chain rings (extending previous results by \textit{B. Yildiz} et al. [Appl. Math. Lett. 23, No. 9, 988--992 (2010; Zbl 1193.94078)]) and when \(A\) is a finite local ring such that \([D(A)]^2={0}\), where \(D(A)\) denotes the set of all zero divisors of \(A\). In order to obtain these results, the authors developed a method based on group action, and they introduced the concept of min-max principle and pairwise weakly linearly independent sets (a subset \(P\) of \(A^n-\left\{0\right\}\) is pairwise weakly linearly independent if no vector in \(P\) is a multiple of another vector in \(P\)). They also described a structural connection between classical covering and short covering. Thus they applied some of previous results in order to improve known bounds on short coverings for several values.