Decomposing tropical rational functions

Abstract

An algorithm is designed which decomposes a tropical univariate rational function into a composition of tropical binomials and trinomials. When a function is monotone, the composition consists just of binomials. Similar algorithms are designed for decomposing tropical algebraic rational functions being (in the classical language) piece-wise linear functions with rational slopes of their linear pieces. In addition, we provide a criterion when the composition of two tropical polynomials commutes (for classical polynomials a similar question was answered by J.~Ritt).