Polymatroids, Closure Operators and Lattices

In this article we study the closure operators of polymatroids from a lattice theoretic point of view. We show that polymatroid closure operators relate to lattices enriched with a generating set in the same way matroids relate to geometric lattices. Through this relation we define a notion of minors for lattices enriched with a generating set. For the lattice of flats of a graphic matroid, the minors of the lattice are shown to correspond to simple minors of the graph when the vertices are labeled and the edges unlabeled. This correspondence is generalized to all polymatroids.