The parity problem of polymatroids without double circuits

According to the present state of the theory of the matroid parity problem, the existence of a good characterization to the size of a maximum matching depends on the behavior of certain substructures, called double circuits. In this paper we prove that if a polymatroid has no double circuits then a partition type min-max formula characterizes the size of a maximum matching. Applications to parity constrained orientations and to a rigidity problem are given. Research is supported by OTKA grants K60802, TS049788 and by European MCRTN Adonet, Contract Grant No. 504438.