Modeling Combinatorial Disjunctive Constraints via Junction Trees

Abstract: We introduce techniques to build small ideal mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulations of combinatorial disjunctive constraints (CDCs) via the independent branching scheme. We present a novel pairwise IB-representable class of CDCs, CDCs admitting junction trees, and provide a combinatorial procedure to build MIP formulations for those constraints. Generalized special ordered sets ($\text{SOS} k$) can be modeled by CDCs admitting junction trees and we also obtain MIP formulations of $\text{SOS} k$. Furthermore, we provide a novel ideal extended formulation of any combinatorial disjunctive constraints with fewer auxiliary binary variables with an application in planar obstacle avoidance.