On the Max-Flow Min-Cut Ratio for Directed Multicommodity Flows

We give a pure combinatorial problem whose solution determines max-flow min-cut ratio for directed multicommodity flows. In addition, this combinatorial problem has applications in improving the approximation factor of Greedy algorithm for maximum edge disjoint path problem. More precisely, our upp...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hajiaghayi, MohammadTaghi, Leighton, F. Thomson
Other Authors: Theory of Computation
Language:en_US
Published: 2005
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/29829
Description
Summary:We give a pure combinatorial problem whose solution determines max-flow min-cut ratio for directed multicommodity flows. In addition, this combinatorial problem has applications in improving the approximation factor of Greedy algorithm for maximum edge disjoint path problem. More precisely, our upper bound improves the approximation factor for this problem to O(n^{3/4}). Finally, we demonstrate how even for very simple graphs the aforementioned ratio might be very large.