A Convex Envelope Formula for Multilinear Functions

Convex envelopes of multilinear functions on a unit hypercube arepolyhedral. This well-known fact makes the convex envelopeapproximation very useful in the linearization of non-linear 0–1programming problems and in global bilinear optimization. This paperpresents necessary and sufficient conditions for a convex envelope to be apolyhedral function and illustrates how these conditions may be used inconstructing of convex envelopes. The main result of the paper is a simpleanalytical formula, which defines some faces of the convex envelope of amultilinear function. This formula proves to be a generalization of the wellknown convex envelope formula for multilinear monomial functions.