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Title: High-Accuracy Multicommodity Flows via Iterative Refinement
The multicommodity flow problem is a classic problem in network flow and combinatorial optimization, with applications in transportation, communication, logistics, and supply chain management, etc. Existing algorithms often focus on low-accuracy approximate solutions, while high-accuracy algorithms typically rely on general linear program solvers. In this paper, we present efficient high-accuracy algorithms for a broad family of multicommodity flow problems on undirected graphs, demonstrating improved running times compared to general linear program solvers. Our main result shows that we can solve the 𝓁_{q, p}-norm multicommodity flow problem to a (1 + ε) approximation in time O_{q, p}(m^{1+o(1)} k² log(1/ε)), where k is the number of commodities, and O_{q, p}(⋅) hides constants depending only on q or p. As q and p approach to 1 and ∞ respectively, 𝓁_{q, p}-norm flow tends to maximum concurrent flow. We introduce the first iterative refinement framework for 𝓁_{q, p}-norm minimization problems, which reduces the problem to solving a series of decomposable residual problems. In the case of k-commodity flow, each residual problem can be decomposed into k single commodity convex flow problems, each of which can be solved in almost-linear time. As many classical variants of multicommodity flows were shown to be complete for linear programs in the high-accuracy regime [Ding-Kyng-Zhang, ICALP'22], our result provides new directions for studying more efficient high-accuracy multicommodity flow algorithms.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2240024
PAR ID:
10563420
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Editor(s):
Bringmann, Karl; Grohe, Martin; Puppis, Gabriele; Svensson, Ola
Publisher / Repository:
Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik
Date Published:
Volume:
297
ISSN:
1868-8969
ISBN:
978-3-95977-322-5
Page Range / eLocation ID:
297-297
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
High-accuracy multicommodity flow Iterative refinement framework Convex flow solver Theory of computation → Continuous optimization
Format(s):
Medium: X Size: 19 pages; 822337 bytes Other: application/pdf
Size(s):
19 pages 822337 bytes
Right(s):
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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