Binary Cyclic Transversal Polytopes

Abstract: With every family of finitely many subsets of a finite-dimensional vector space over the Galois-field with two elements we associate a cyclic transversal polytope. It turns out that those polytopes generalize several well-known polytopes that are relevant in combinatorial optimization, among them cut polytopes as well as stable set and matching polytopes. We introduce the class of lifted odd-set inequalities and prove results demonstrating their strength. In particular, we show that they suffice to describe cyclic transversal polytopes if the union of the sets in the family has rank at most two. We also describe extended formulations for cyclic transversal polytopes and introduce a special relaxation hierarchy for them.