On the representability of totally unimodular matrices on bidirected graphs

Seymour’s famous decomposition theorem for regular matroids states that any totally unimodular (TU) matrix can be constructed through a series of composition operations called k-sums starting from network matrices and their transposes and two compact representation matrices B1, B2 of a certain ten element matroid. Given that B1, B2 are binet matrices we examine the k-sums of network and binet matrices. It is shown that the k-sum of a network and a binet matrix is a binet matrix, but binet matrices are not closed under this operation for k = 2, 3. A new class of matrices is introduced the so called tour matrices, which generalises network, binet and totally unimodular matrices. For any such matrix there exists a bidirected graph such that the columns represent a collection of closed tours in the graph. It is shown that tour matrices are closed under k-sums, as well as under pivoting and other elementary operations on its rows and columns. Given the constructive proofs of the above results regarding the k-sum operation and existing recognition algorithms for network and binet matrices, an algorithm is presented which constructs a bidirected graph for any TU matrix.