Transitive Packing: A Unifying Concept in Combinatorial Optimization

Abstract

This paper attempts to provide a better understanding of the facial structure of polyhedra previously investigated separately. It introduces the notion of transitive packing and the transitive packing polytope. Polytopes that turn out to be special cases of the transitive packing polytope include the node packing, acyclic subdigraph, bipartite subgraph, planar subgraph, clique partitioning, partition, transitive acyclic subdigraph, interval order, and relatively transitive subgraph polytopes. We give cutting plane proofs for several rich classes of valid inequalities of the transitive packing polytope, thereby introducing generalized cycle, generalized clique, generalized antihole, generalized antiweb, and odd partition inequalities. On the one hand, these classes subsume several known classes of valid inequalities for several special cases; on the other hand, they yield many new inequalities for several other special cases. For some of the classes we also prove a lower bound on their Gomory--Chvatal rank. Finally, we relate the concept of transitive packing to generalized (set) packing and covering, as well as to balanced and ideal matrices.