The Edmonds-Giles Conjecture and its Relaxations

Given a directed graph, a directed cut is a cut with all arcs oriented in the same direction, and a directed join is a set of arcs which intersects every directed cut at least once. Edmonds and Giles conjectured for all weighted directed graphs, the minimum weight of a directed cut is equal to the maximum size of a packing of directed joins. Unfortunately, the conjecture is false; a counterexample was first given by Schrijver. However its ”dual” statement, that the minimum weight of a dijoin is equal to the maximum number of dicuts in a packing, was shown to be true by Luchessi and Younger. Various relaxations of the conjecture have been considered; Woodall’s conjecture remains open, which asks the same question for unweighted directed graphs, and Edmond- Giles conjecture was shown to be true in the special case of source-sink connected directed graphs. Following these inquries, this thesis explores different relaxations of the Edmond- Giles conjecture

Woodall's conjecture and the Lucchesi-Younger theorem

Treballs Finals de Grau de Matemàtiques, Facultat de Matemàtiques, Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2022, Director: Kolja Knauer[en] This project is about directed cuts, directed joins and their packings. We study the open problem of Woodall’s Conjecture, a problem studied by many authors to such an extent that it even has a $5000 dollars prize for his demonstration set by G. Cornuéjols. We will also cover the Lucchesi-Younger Theorem proof which can be seen as a dual result of the conjecture and the counterexample for the Edmonds-Giles Conjecture, the weighted version of Woodall’s Conjecture. Besides studying the theory we have set ourselves the goal of proposing a program that given a graph, checks if all of its orientations validate the Woodall’s Conjecture. This program should be able to prove the conjecture, up to a certain number of vertices, by testing all the different combinations

Intersecting restrictions in clutters

A clutter is intersecting if the members do not have a common element yet every two members intersect. It has been conjectured that for clutters without an intersecting minor, total primal integrality and total dual integrality of the corresponding set covering linear system must be equivalent. In this paper, we provide a polynomial characterization of clutters without an intersecting minor. One important class of intersecting clutters comes from projective planes, namely the deltas, while another comes from graphs, namely the blockers of extended odd holes. Using similar techniques, we provide a poly- nomial algorithm for finding a delta or the blocker of an extended odd hole minor in a given clutter. This result is quite surprising as the same problem is NP-hard if the input were the blocker instead of the clutter

Arc connectivity and submodular flows in digraphs

Let $D=(V,A)$ be a digraph. For an integer $k\geq 1$, a $k$-arc-connected flip is an arc subset of $D$ such that after reversing the arcs in it the digraph becomes (strongly) $k$-arc-connected. The first main result of this paper introduces a sufficient condition for the existence of a $k$-arc-connected flip that is also a submodular flow for a crossing submodular function. More specifically, given some integer $\tau\geq 1$, suppose $d_A^+(U)+(\frac{\tau}{k}-1)d_A^-(U)\geq \tau$ for all $U\subsetneq V, U\neq \emptyset$, where $d_A^+(U)$ and $d_A^-(U)$ denote the number of arcs in $A$ leaving and entering $U$, respectively. Let $\mathcal{C}$ be a crossing family over ground set $V$, and let $f:\mathcal{C}\to \mathbb{Z}$ be a crossing submodular function such that $f(U)\geq \frac{k}{\tau}(d_A^+(U)-d_A^-(U))$ for all $U\in \mathcal{C}$. Then $D$ has a $k$-arc-connected flip $J$ such that $f(U)\geq d_J^+(U)-d_J^-(U)$ for all $U\in \mathcal{C}$. The result has several applications to Graph Orientations and Combinatorial Optimization. In particular, it strengthens Nash-Williams' so-called weak orientation theorem, and proves a weaker variant of Woodall's conjecture on digraphs whose underlying undirected graph is $\tau$-edge-connected. The second main result of this paper is even more general. It introduces a sufficient condition for the existence of capacitated integral solutions to the intersection of two submodular flow systems. This sufficient condition implies the classic result of Edmonds and Giles on the box-total dual integrality of a submodular flow system. It also has the consequence that in a weakly connected digraph, the intersection of two submodular flow systems is totally dual integral.Comment: 29 pages, 4 figure

On a packing problem for infinite graphs and independence spaces

In this paper several infinite extensions of the well-known results for packing bases in finite matroids are considered. A counterexample is given to a conjecture of Nash-Williams on edge-disjoint spanning trees of countable graphs, and a sufficient condition is proved for the packing problem in independence spaces over a countably infinite set. © 1979

A min-max theorem on tournaments

We present a structural characterization of all tournaments T = (V, A) such that, for any nonnegative integral weight function defined on V, the maximum size of a feedback vertex set packing is equal to the minimum weight of a triangle in T. We also answer a question of Frank by showing that it is N P-complete to decide whether the vertex set of a given tournament can be partitioned into two feedback vertex sets. In addition, we give exact and approximation algorithms for the feedback vertex set packing problem on tournaments. ©2007 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.published_or_final_versio