Feasible Bases for a Polytope Related to the Hamilton Cycle Problem

Title
Feasible Bases for a Polytope Related to the Hamilton Cycle Problem
Publication Date
2021-11
Author(s)
Kalinowski, Thomas
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8444-6848
Email: tkalinow@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:tkalinow
Mohammadian, Sogol
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
Place of publication
United States of America
DOI
10.1287/moor.2020.1112
UNE publication id
une:1959.11/30253
Abstract

We study a certain polytope depending on a graph G and a parameter β ∈ (0,1) that arises from embedding the Hamiltonian cycle problem in a discounted Markov decision process. Literature suggests a conjecture a lower bound on the proportion of feasible bases corresponding to Hamiltonian cycles in the set of all feasible bases. We make progress toward a proof of the conjecture by proving results about the structure of feasible bases. In particular, we prove three main results: (1) the set of feasible bases is independent of the parameter β when the parameter is close to one, (2) the polytope can be interpreted as a generalized network flow polytope, and (3) we deduce a combinatorial interpretation of the feasible bases. We also provide a full characterization for a special class of feasible bases, and we apply this to provide some computational support for the conjecture.

Link
Citation
Mathematics of Operations Research, 46(4), p. 1366-1389
ISSN
1526-5471
0364-765X
Start page
1366
End page
1389

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