Finding minimum-cost circulations by canceling negative cycles

  • Authors:
  • Andrew V. Goldberg;Robert E. Tarjan

  • Affiliations:
  • Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA;Princeton Univ., Princeton, NJ

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the ACM (JACM)
  • Year:
  • 1989

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Abstract

A classical algorithm for finding a minimum-cost circulation consists of repeatedly finding a residual cycle of negative cost and canceling it by pushing enough flow around the cycle to saturate an arc. We show that a judicious choice of cycles for canceling leads to a polynomial bound on the number of iterations in this algorithm. This gives a very simple strongly polynomial algorithm that uses no scaling. A variant of the algorithm that uses dynamic trees runs in &Ogr;(nm(log n)min{log(nC), m log n}) time on a network of n vertices, m arcs, and arc costs of maximum absolute value C. This bound is comparable to those of the fastest previously known algorithms.