Smallest Compact Formulation for the Permutahedron

In this note, we consider the permutahedron, the convex hull of all permutations of {1,2…,n} . We show how to obtain an extended formulation for this polytope from any sorting network. By using the optimal Ajtai–Komlós–Szemerédi sorting network, this extended formulation has Θ(nlogn) variables and i...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Goemans, Michel X.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mathematics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Springer-Verlag 2014
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/87079
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0520-1165
Description
Summary:In this note, we consider the permutahedron, the convex hull of all permutations of {1,2…,n} . We show how to obtain an extended formulation for this polytope from any sorting network. By using the optimal Ajtai–Komlós–Szemerédi sorting network, this extended formulation has Θ(nlogn) variables and inequalities. Furthermore, from basic polyhedral arguments, we show that this is best possible (up to a multiplicative constant) since any extended formulation has at least Ω(nlogn) inequalities. The results easily extend to the generalized permutahedron.