Factorizations of the same length in abelian monoids

Let $\mathcal S \subseteq \mathbb Z^m \oplus T$ be a finitely generated and reduced monoid. In this paper we develop a general strategy to study the set of elements in $\mathcal S$ having at least two factorizations of the same length, namely the ideal $\mathcal L_{\mathcal S}$. To this end, we work with a certain (lattice) ideal associated to the monoid $\mathcal S$. Our study can be seen as a new approach generalizing \cite{chapman:2011}, which only studies the case of numerical semigroups. When $\mathcal S$ is a numerical semigroup we give three main results: (1) we compute explicitly a set of generators of the ideal $\mathcal L_{\mathcal S}$ when $\mathcal S$ is minimally generated by an almost arithmetic sequence; (2) we provide an infinite family of numerical semigroups such that $\mathcal L_{\mathcal S}$ is a principal ideal; (3) we classify the computational problem of determining the largest integer not in $\mathcal L_{\mathcal S}$ as an $\mathcal{NP}$-hard problem.

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