Polyhedron manipulation in Python

March 3, 2025 · View on GitHub

This library interfaces common operations over convex polyhedra such as polytope projection and vertex enumeration. Check out the documentation for details.

Installation

Using conda

Install the cdd dependency first:

$ conda install cddlib

Then install pypoman from PyPI:

$ pip install pypoman

It won't need to build cdd from source as it is installed from conda-forge.

Building from source

Install system packages for cdd and GLPK, for instance on Debian-based Linux distributions:

$ sudo apt-get install cython libcdd-dev libglpk-dev libgmp3-dev

You can then install the library from PyPI as follows. This approach will likely require building cdd from source.

$ pip install pypoman

Some functions, such as point-polytope projection and polygon intersection, are optional and not installed by default. To enable all of them, run:

$ pip install pypoman[all]

Examples

Vertex enumeration

We can compute the list of vertices of a polytope described in halfspace representation by $A x \leq b$ :

import numpy as np
from pypoman import compute_polytope_vertices

A = np.array([
    [-1,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0],
    [0, -1,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0],
    [0,  0, -1,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0],
    [0,  0,  0, -1,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0],
    [0,  0,  0,  0, -1,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0],
    [0,  0,  0,  0,  0, -1,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0],
    [0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0, -1,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0],
    [0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0, -1,  0,  0,  0,  0],
    [0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0, -1,  0,  0,  0],
    [0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0, -1,  0,  0],
    [0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0, -1,  0],
    [0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0, -1],
    [1,  1,  1,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0],
    [0,  0,  0,  1,  1,  1,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0],
    [0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  1,  1,  1,  0,  0,  0],
    [0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  1,  1,  1],
    [1,  0,  0,  1,  0,  0,  1,  0,  0,  1,  0,  0],
    [0,  1,  0,  0,  1,  0,  0,  1,  0,  0,  1,  0],
    [0,  0,  1,  0,  0,  1,  0,  0,  1,  0,  0,  1]])
b = np.array([0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 3])

vertices = compute_polytope_vertices(A, b)

Halfspace enumeration

The other way round, assume we know the vertices of a polytope, and want to get its halfspace representation $A x \leq b$ .

import numpy as np
from pypoman import compute_polytope_halfspaces

vertices = map(
    np.array,
    [[1, 0, 0], [0, 1, 0], [1, 1, 0], [0, 0, 1], [0, 1, 1]],
)

A, b = compute_polytope_halfspaces(vertices)

Polytope projection

Let us project an $n$ -dimensional polytope $A x \leq b$ over $x = [x_1\ \ldots\ x_n]$ onto its first two coordinates $proj(x) = [x_1 x_2]$ :

from numpy import array, eye, ones, vstack, zeros
from pypoman import plot_polygon, project_polytope

n = 10  # dimension of the original polytope
p = 2   # dimension of the projected polytope

# Original polytope:
# - inequality constraints: \forall i, |x_i| <= 1
# - equality constraint: sum_i x_i = 0
A = vstack([+eye(n), -eye(n)])
b = ones(2 * n)
C = ones(n).reshape((1, n))
d = array([0])
ineq = (A, b)  # A * x <= b
eq = (C, d)    # C * x == d

# Projection is proj(x) = [x_0 x_1]
E = zeros((p, n))
E[0, 0] = 1.
E[1, 1] = 1.
f = zeros(p)
proj = (E, f)  # proj(x) = E * x + f

vertices = project_polytope(proj, ineq, eq, method='bretl')

We can then plot the projected polytope:

import pylab

pylab.ion()
pylab.figure()
plot_polygon(vertices)