Polyhedral properties of RLT relaxations of nonconvex quadratic programs and their implications on exact relaxations

We study linear programming relaxations of nonconvex quadratic programs given by the reformulation-linearization technique (RLT), referred to as RLT relaxations. We investigate the relations between the polyhedral properties of the feasible regions of a quadratic program and its RLT relaxation. We establish various connections between recession directions, boundedness, and vertices of the two feasible regions. Using these properties, we present a complete description of the set of instances that admit an exact RLT relaxation. We then give a thorough discussion of how our results can be converted into simple algorithmic procedures to construct instances of quadratic programs with exact, inexact, or unbounded RLT relaxations.