New Polyhedral and Algorithmic Results on Greedoids

Abstract

We present various new results on greedoids. We prove a theorem that generalizes an equivalent formulation of Edmonds' classic matroid polytope theorem to local forest greedoids -- a class of greedoids that contains matroids as well as branching greedoids. We also describe an application of this theorem in the field of measuring the reliability of networks by game-theoretical tools. Finally, we prove new results on the optimality of the greedy algorithm on greedoids and correct some mistakes that have been present in the literature for almost three decades.