Convex Hull Characterizations of Lexicographic Orderings

Given a p-dimensional nonnegative, integral vector α, this paper characterizes the convex hull of the set S of nonnegative, integral vectors x that is lexicographically less than or equal to α. To obtain a finite number of elements in S, the vectors x are restricted to be component-wise upper-bounded by an integral vector u. We … Read more

The Strength of Dantzig-Wolfe Reformulations for the Stable Set and Related Problems

Dantzig-Wolfe reformulation of an integer program convexifies a subset of the constraints, which yields an extended formulation with a potentially stronger linear programming (LP) relaxation. We would like to better understand the strength of such reformulations in general. As a first step we investigate the classical edge formulation for the stable set problem. We characterize … Read more

Totally Unimodular Congestion Games

We investigate a new class of congestion games, called Totally Unimodular Congestion Games, in which the strategies of each player are expressed as binary vectors lying in a polyhedron defined using a totally unimodular constraint matrix and an integer right-hand side. We study both the symmetric and the asymmetric variants of the game. In the … Read more

Coercive polynomials: Stability, order of growth, and Newton polytopes

In this article we introduce a stability concept for the coercivity of multivariate polynomials $f \in \mathbb{R}[x]$. In particular, we consider perturbations of $f$ by polynomials up to the so-called degree of stable coercivity, and we analyze this stability concept in terms of the corresponding Newton polytopes at infinity. For coercive polynomials $f \in \mathbb{R}[x]$ … Read more

Extended Formulations for Vertex Cover

The vertex cover polytopes of graphs do not admit polynomial-size extended formulations. This motivates the search for polyhedral analogues to approximation algorithms and fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) algorithms. While the polyhedral approximability of vertex cover has been studied, we know of no extended formulations parameterized by the size of the vertex cover. To this end, we … Read more

New Valid Inequalities and Facets for the Simple Plant Location Problem

The Simple Plant Location Problem is a well-known (and NP-hard) combinatorial optimisation problem, with applications in logistics. We present a new family of valid inequalities for the associated family of polyhedra, and show that it contains an exponentially large number of new facet-defining members. We also present a new procedure, called facility augmentation, which enables … Read more

Improved compact formulations for graph partitioning in sparse graphs

Given a graph $G=(V,E)$ where $|V|=n$ and $|E|=m$. Graph partitioning problems on $G$ are to find a partition of the vertices in $V$ into clusters satisfying several additional constraints in order to minimize or maximize the number (or the weight) of the edges whose endnodes do not belong to the same cluster. These problems are … Read more

Polyhedral studies of vertex coloring problems: The standard formulation

Despite the fact that many vertex coloring problems are polynomially solvable on certain graph classes, most of these problems are not “under control” from a polyhedral point of view. The equivalence between optimization and separation suggests the existence of integer programming formulations for these problems whose associated polytopes admit elegant characterizations. In this work we … Read more

Extended Formulations for Independence Polytopes of Regular Matroids

We show that the independence polytope of every regular matroid has an extended formulation of size quadratic in the size of its ground set. This generalizes a similar statement for (co-)graphic matroids, which is a simple consequence of Martin’s extended formulation for the spanning-tree polytope. In our construction, we make use of Seymour’s decomposition theorem … Read more