On the bond polytope

Abstract While the maximum cut problem and its corresponding polytope has received a lot of attention inliterature, comparably little is known about the natural closely related variant maximum bond. Here, given a graph G = (V, E) , we ask for a maximum cut δ(S) ⊆ E with S ⊆ V under the restriction that both G [ S ] as well as G [ V \ S ] are connected. Observe that both the maximum cut and the maximum bond can be seen as inverse problems to the traditional minimum cut, as there, the connectivity arises naturally in optimal solutions. The bond polytope is the convex hull of all incidence vectors of bonds. Similar to the connection of the corresponding optimization problems, the bond polytope is closely related to the cut polytope. While the latter has been intensively studied, there are no results on bond polytopes. We start a structural study of the latter, which additionally allows us to deduce algorithmic consequences. We investigate the relation between cut- and bond polytopes and the additional intricacies that arise when requiring connectivity in the solutions. We study the effect of graph modifications on bond polytopes and their facets, akin to what has been spearheaded for cut polytopes by Barahona, Grötschel and Mahjoub [4; 3] and Deza and Laurant [17; 15; 16]. Moreover, we study facet-defining inequalities arising from edges and cycles for bond polytopes. In particular, these yield a complete linear description of bond polytopes of cycles and 3-connected planar ( K 5 − e )-minor free graphs. Finally, we present a reduction of the maximum bond problem on arbitrary graphs to the maximum bond problem on 3-connected graphs. This yields a linear time algorithm for maximum bond on ( K 5 − e )-minor free graphs.