Paper detail

Complexity of linear relaxations in integer programming

For a set $X$ of integer points in a polyhedron, the smallest number of facets of any polyhedron whose set of integer points coincides with $X$ is called the relaxation complexity $\mathrm{rc}(X)$. This parameter was introduced by Kaibel & Weltge (2015) and captures the complexity of linear descriptions of $X$ without using auxiliary variables. Using tools from combinatorics, geometry of numbers, and quantifier elimination, we make progress on several open questions regarding $\mathrm{rc}(X)$ and its variant $\mathrm{rc}_{\mathbb{Q}}(X)$, restricting the descriptions of $X$ to rational polyhedra. As our main results we show that $\mathrm{rc}(X) = \mathrm{rc}_{\mathbb{Q}}(X)$ when: (a) $X$ is at most four-dimensional, (b) $X$ represents every residue class in $(\mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z})^d$, (c) the convex hull of $X$ contains an interior integer point, or (d) the lattice-width of $X$ is above a certain threshold. Additionally, $\mathrm{rc}(X)$ can be algorithmically computed when $X$ is at most three-dimensional, or $X$ satisfies one of the conditions (b), (c), or (d) above. Moreover, we obtain an improved lower bound on $\mathrm{rc}(X)$ in terms of the dimension of $X$.