Polymatroid

In mathematics, a polymatroid is a polytope associated with a submodular function. The notion was
introduced by Jack Edmonds in 1970.[1] It is also described as the multiset analogue of the matroid.

Definition
Let be a finite set and a non-decreasing submodular function, that is, for each
we have , and for each we have
. We define the polymatroid associated to to be the following
polytope:

When we allow the entries of to be negative we denote this polytope by , and call it the extended
polymatroid associated to .[2]

An equivalent definition

Let be a finite set. If then we denote by the sum of the entries of , and write
whenever for every (notice that this gives an order to ). A polymatroid on the
ground set is a nonempty compact subset in , the set of independent vectors, such that:

1. We have that if , then for every :

2. If with , then there is a vector such that
.

This definition is equivalent to the one described before,[3] where is the function defined by
for every .

Relation to matroids
To every matroid on the ground set we can associate the set , where is the
set of independent sets of and we denote by the characteristic vector of : for every
By taking the convex hull of we get a polymatroid. It is associated to the rank function of . The
conditions of the second definition reflect the axioms for the independent sets of a matroid.

Relation to generalized permutahedra

Because generalized permutahedra can be constructed from submodular functions, and every generalized
permutahedron has an associated submodular function, we have that there should be a correspondence
between generalized permutahedra and polymatroids. In fact every polymatroid is a generalized
permutahedron that has been translated to have a vertex in the origin. This result suggests that the
combinatorial information of polymatroids is shared with generalized permutahedra.

Properties
is nonempty if and only if and that is nonempty if and only if .

Given any extended polymatroid there is a unique submodular function such that and
.

Contrapolymatroids
For a supermodular f one analogously may define the contrapolymatroid

This analogously generalizes the dominant of the spanning set polytope of matroids.

Discrete polymatroids
When we only focus on the lattice points of our polymatroids we get what is called, discrete
polymatroids. Formally speaking, the definition of a discrete polymatroid goes exactly as the one for
polymatroids except for where the vectors will live in, instead of they will live in . This
combinatorial object is of great interest because of their relationship to monomial ideals.

References
Footnotes

1. Edmonds, Jack. Submodular functions, matroids, and certain polyhedra. 1970.

Combinatorial Structures and their Applications (Proc. Calgary Internat. Conf., Calgary, Alta.,
1969) pp. 69–87 Gordon and Breach, New York. MR0270945 (https://mathscinet.ams.org/ma
thscinet-getitem?mr=0270945)
2. Schrijver, Alexander (2003), Combinatorial Optimization, Springer, §44, p. 767, ISBN 3-540-
44389-4
3. J.Herzog, T.Hibi. Monomial Ideals. 2011. Graduate Texts in Mathematics 260, pp. 237–263
Springer-Verlag, London.
Additional reading

Lee, Jon (2004), A First Course in Combinatorial Optimization, Cambridge University Press,
ISBN 0-521-01012-8
Fujishige, Satoru (2005), Submodular Functions and Optimization, Elsevier, ISBN 0-444-
52086-4
Narayanan, H. (1997), Submodular Functions and Electrical Networks, ISBN 0-444-82523-1

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