GEOMETRY OF OPTIMAL VALUE-FUNCTIONS WITH APPLICATIONS TO REDUNDANCY IN LINEAR-PROGRAMMING

In 1967, Wets and Witzgall (Ref. 1) made, in passing, a connection between frames of polyhedral cones and redundancy in linear programming. The present work elaborates and formalizes the theoretical details needed to establish this relation. We study the properties of optimal value functions in order to derive the correspondence between problems in redundancy and the frame of a polyhedral cone. The insights obtained lead to schemes to improve the efficiency of procedures to detect redundancy in the areas of linear programming, stochastic programming, and computational geometry.