The caterpillar-packing polytope

A caterpillar is a connected graph such that the removal of all its vertices with degree 1 results in a path. Given a graph G, a caterpillar-packing ofG is a set of vertex-disjoint (not necessarily induced) subgraphs of G such that each subgraph is a caterpillar. In this work we consider the set of caterpillar-packings of a graph, which corresponds to feasible solutions of the 2-schemes strip cutting problem with a sequencing constraint (2-SSCPsc) presented by F. Rinaldi and A. Franz in 2007. We study the polytope associated with a natural integer programming formulation of this problem. We explore basic properties of this polytope, including a lifting lemma and several facet-preserving operations on the graph. These results allow us to introduce several families of facet-inducing inequalities.