Circular Ones Matrices and the Stable Set Polytope of Quasi-Line Graphs

It is a long standing open problem to find an explicit description of the stable set polytope of clawfree graphs. Yet more than 20 years after the discovery of a polynomial algorithm for the maximum stable set problem for claw-free graphs, there is even no conjecture at hand today. Such a conjecture exists for the class of quasi-line graphs. This class of graphs is a proper superclass of line graphs and a proper subclass of claw-free graphs for which it is known that not all facets have 0/1 normal vectors. Ben Rebea’s conjecture states that the stable set polytope of a quasi-line graph is completely described by clique-family inequalities. Chudnovsky and Seymour recently provided a decomposition result for claw-free graphs and proved that Ben Rebea’s conjecture holds, if the quasi-line graph is not a fuzzy circular interval graph. In this paper, we give a proof of Ben Rebea’s conjecture by showing that it also holds for fuzzy circular interval graphs. Our result builds upon an algorithm of Bartholdi, Orlin and Ratliff which is concerned with integer programs defined by circular ones matrices.