Projections of Extended Formulations with precedence Variables for the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem

Gouveia and Pires (European Journal of Operations Research 112(1999) 134-146) have proposed four extended formulations having precedence variables as extra variables and characterized the projections of three of the four formulations into the natural variable space. In Gouveia and Pires (Discrete Applied Mathematics 112 (2001)), they also have introduced some other extended formulations with the same extra variables and conjectured that the projection of one of the proposed formulations is equivalent to the one proposed by Dantzig, Fulkerson, and Johnson (Operations Research 2(1954) 393-410). In this paper, we provide a unifying framework based on which we give alternative proofs on the projections of three extended formulations and new proofs on those of two formulations appeared in Gouveia and Pires(1999, 2001).