Adhesivity of polymatroids Original Research Article

Two polymatroids are adhesive if a polymatroid extends both in such a way that two ground sets become a modular pair. Motivated by entropy functions, the class of polymatroids with adhesive restrictions and a class of selfadhesive polymatroids are introduced and studied. Adhesivity is described by polyhedral cones of rank functions and defining inequalities of the cones are identified, among them known and new non-Shannon type information inequalities for entropy functions. The selfadhesive polymatroids on a four-element set are characterized by Zhang–Yeung inequalities.