In this paper, we present a method to determine if a lift-and-project cut for
a mixed-integer linear program is irregular, in which case the cut is not
equivalent to any intersection cut from the bases of the linear relaxation.
This is an important question due to the intense research activity for the past
decade on cuts from multiple rows of simplex tableau as well as on
lift-and-project cuts from non-split disjunctions. While it is known since
Balas and Perregaard (2003) that lift-and-project cuts from split disjunctions
are always equivalent to intersection cuts and consequently to such multi-row
cuts, Balas and Kis (2016) have recently shown that there is a necessary and
sufficient condition in the case of arbitrary disjunctions: a lift-and-project
cut is regular if, and only if, it corresponds to a regular basic solution of
the Cut Generating Linear Program (CGLP). This paper has four contributions.
First, we state a result that simplifies the verification of regularity for
basic CGLP solutions from Balas and Kis (2016). Second, we provide a
mixed-integer formulation that checks whether there is a regular CGLP solution
for a given cut that is regular in a broader sense, which also encompasses
irregular cuts that are implied by the regular cut closure. Third, we describe
a numerical procedure based on such formulation that identifies irregular
lift-and-project cuts. Finally, we use this method to evaluate how often
lift-and-project cuts from simple t-branch split disjunctions are irregular,
and thus not equivalent to multi-row cuts, on 74 instances of the MIPLIB
benchmarks.Comment: INFORMS Journal on Computing (to appear
