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A computational comparison of the dinic and network simplex methods for maximum flow

  • Chapter II Network Flows
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Abstract

We study the implementation of two fundamentally different algorithms for solving the maximum flow problem: Dinic's method and the network simplex method. For the former, we present the design of a storage-efficient implementation. For the latter, we develop a "steepest-edge" pivot selection criterion that is easy to include in an existing network simplex implementation. We compare the computational efficiency of these two methods on a personal computer with a set of generated problems of up to 4 600 nodes and 27 000 arcs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University, 10027, New York, NY, USA

    Donald Goldfarb

  2. Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, 08903, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Michael D. Grigoriadis

Authors
  1. Donald Goldfarb
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  2. Michael D. Grigoriadis
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Additional information

This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. MCS-8113503 and DMS-8512277.

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Goldfarb, D., Grigoriadis, M.D. A computational comparison of the dinic and network simplex methods for maximum flow. Ann Oper Res 13, 81–123 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02288321

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02288321

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