Cancel-and-tighten algorithm for quickest flow problems

Abstract

Given a directed graph with a capacity and a transit time for each arc and with single source and single sink nodes, the quickest flow problem is to find the minimum time horizon to send a given amount of flow from the source to the sink. This is one of the fundamental dynamic flow problems. Parametric search is one of the basic approaches to solving the problem. Recently, Lin and Jaillet (SODA, 2015) proposed an algorithm whose time complexity is the same as that of the minimum cost flow algorithm. Their algorithm employs a cost scaling technique, and its time complexity is weakly polynomial time. In this article, we modify their algorithm by adopting a technique to construct a strongly polynomial time algorithm for solving the minimum cost flow problem. The proposed algorithm runs in O ( n m 2 ( log n ) 2 ) time, where n and m are the numbers of nodes and arcs, respectively. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, 2016