Conforti-Cornuéjols conjecture on the MFMC property

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Is it true that a clutter has the MFMC property if and only if it has the packing property?


Remarks

This was conjectured by Conforti and Cornuéjols [1]. Some classes where the conjecture is known to hold:

  • A clutter is binary if every member of its blocker intersects each member of the clutter in an odd number of elements. Seymour[2] proved that an ideal binary clutter has the MFMC propery if and only if it does not have a [math]{\mathcal Q}_6[/math] minor (one way to define [math]{\mathcal Q}_6[/math] is that the ground set is the edge set of [math]K_4[/math], and the hyperedges are the triangles). This implies the conjecture for binary clutters because [math]{\mathcal Q}_6[/math] does not have the packing property.
  • A clutter is diadic if every member of its blocker intersects each member of the clutter in at most 2 elements. It is shown in [3] that a diadic clutter is ideal if and only if it has the MFMC property. This implies the conjecture because every clutter with the packing property is ideal.

References

  1. M. Conforti, G. Cornuéjols, Clutters that Pack and the Max Flow Min Cut Property: A Conjecture, Technical Report link
  2. P.D. Seymour, The matroids with the max-flow min-cut property, DOI link
  3. G. Cornuéjols, B. Guenin, F. Margot, The packing property, DOI link