A TDI system and its application to approximation algorithms

We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for tournaments to possess a min-max relation on packing and covering directed cycles, together with strongly polynomial time algorithms for the feedback vertex set problem and the cycle packing problem in this class of tournaments; the condition and the algorithms are all based on a totally dual integral (TDI) system, a theoretical framework introduced by J. Edmonds and R. Giles (1994) for establishing min-max results. As a consequence, we find a 2.5-approximation polynomial time algorithm for the feedback vertex set problem in any tournament.