On the Complexity of Some Facet-Defining Inequalities of the QAP-polytope

Abstract

The Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) is a well-known NP-hard problem that is equivalent to optimizing a linear objective function over the QAP polytope. The QAP polytope with parameter $n$ - \qappolytope{n} - is defined as the convex hull of rank-$1$ matrices $xx^T$ with $x$ as the vectorized $n\times n$ permutation matrices. In this paper we consider all the known exponential-sized families of facet-defining inequalities of the QAP-polytope. We describe a new family of valid inequalities that we show to be facet-defining. We also show that membership testing (and hence optimizing) over some of the known classes of inequalities is coNP-complete. We complement our hardness results by showing a lower bound of $2^{\Omega(n)}$ on the extension complexity of all relaxations of \qappolytope{n} for which any of the known classes of inequalities are valid.