Optimum path packing on wheels: The consecutive case

We show that, given a wheel with nonnegative edge lengths and pairs of terminals located on the wheelʹs outer cycle such that the terminal pairs are in consecutive order, then a path packing, i.e., a collection of edge disjoint paths connecting the given terminal pairs, of minimum length can be found in strongly polynomial time. Moreover, we exhibit for this case a system of linear inequalities that provides a complete and nonredundant description of the path packing polytope, which is the convex hull of all incidence vectors of path packings and their supersets.