Extreme Points of Certain Transportation Polytopes with Fixed Total Sums

Abstract

Transportation matrices are $m\times n$ nonnegative matrices with given row sum vector $R$ and column sum vector $S$. All such matrices form the convex polytope $\mathcal{U}(R,S)$ which is called a transportation polytope and its extreme points have been classified. In this article, we consider a new class of convex polytopes $\Delta(\bar{R},\bar{S},\sigma)$ consisting of certain transportation polytopes satisfying that the sum of all elements is $\sigma$, and the row and column sum vectors are dominated componentwise by the given positive vectors $\bar{R}$ and $\bar{S}$, respectively. We characterize the extreme points of $\Delta(\bar{R},\bar{S},\sigma)$. Moreover, we give the minimal term rank and maximal permanent of $\Delta(\bar{R},\bar{S},\sigma)$.