Faster approximation schemes for fractional multicommodity flow problems via dynamic graph algorithms

In dynamic graph algorithms the following provide-or-bound problem has to be solved quickly: Given a set S containing a subset R and a way of generating random elements from S testing for membership in R, either (i) provide an element of R, or (ii) give a (small) upper bound on the size of R that holds with high probability. We give an optimal algorithm for this problem. This algorithm improves the time per operation for various dynamic graph algorithms by a factor of O(log n). For example, it improves the time per update for fully dynamic connectivity from O(log3n) to O(log2n). © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 11, 369–379 (1997)

Dynamic graph algorithms have been extensively studied in the last two decades due to their wide applicability in many contexts. Recently, several implementations and experimental studies have been conducted investigating the practical merits of fundamental techniques and algorithms. In most cases, these algorithms required sophisticated engineering and fine-tuning to be turned into efficient implementations. In this paper, we survey several implementations along with their experimental studies for dynamic problems on undirected and directed graphs. The former case includes dynamic connectivity, dynamic minimum spanning trees, and the sparsification technique. The latter case includes dynamic transitive closure and dynamic shortest paths. We also discuss the design and implementation of a software library for dynamic graph algorithms.

A (fully) dynamic graph algorithm is a data structure that supports edge insertions, edge deletions, and answers certain queries that are specific to the problem under consideration. There has been a lot of research on dynamic algorithms for graph problems that are solvable in polynomial time by a static algorithm. However, while there is a large body of theoretical work on efficient dynamic graph algorithms, a lot of these algorithms were never implemented and empirically evaluated.In this work, we consider the fully dynamic edge orientation problem, also called fully dynamic Δ-orientation problem, which is to maintain an orientation of the edges of an undirected graph such that the out-degree is low. If edges are inserted or deleted, one may have to flip the orientation of some edges in order to avoid vertices having a large out-degree. While there has been theoretical work on dynamic versions of this problem, currently there is no experimental evaluation available. In this work, we close this gap and engineer a range of new dynamic edge orientation algorithms as well as algorithms from the current literature. The most successful newly proposed algorithms in this paper are based on repeatedly swapping edges with smallest degree neighbors and based on breadth-first search. Moreover, we evaluate these algorithms on real-world dynamic graphs. Generally, these algorithms outperform the algorithms currently proposed in the literature. The best algorithm considered in this paper in terms of quality, based on a simple breadth-first search, computes the optimum result more than 90% of the instances and is on average only 2.4% worse than the optimum solution.*The full version of the paper can be accessed at https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06968

Many dynamic graph algorithms have an amortized update time, rather than a stronger worst-case guarantee. But amortized data structures are not suitable for real-time systems, where each individual operation has to be executed quickly. For this reason, there exist many recent randomized results that aim to provide a guarantee stronger than amortized expected. The strongest possible guarantee for a randomized algorithm is that it is always correct (Las Vegas) and has high-probability worst-case update time, which gives a bound on the time for each individual operation that holds with high probability. In this article, we present the first polylogarithmic high-probability worst-case time bounds for the dynamic spanner and the dynamic maximal matching problem. (1) For dynamic spanner, the only known o ( n ) worst-case bounds were O ( n 3/4 ) high-probability worst-case update time for maintaining a 3-spanner and O ( n 5/9 ) for maintaining a 5-spanner. We give a O (1) k log 3 ( n ) high-probability worst-case time bound for maintaining a ( 2k-1 )-spanner, which yields the first worst-case polylog update time for all constant k . (All the results above maintain the optimal tradeoff of stretch 2k-1 and Õ( n 1+1/k ) edges.) (2) For dynamic maximal matching, or dynamic 2-approximate maximum matching, no algorithm with o(n) worst-case time bound was known and we present an algorithm with O (log 5 ( n )) high-probability worst-case time; similar worst-case bounds existed only for maintaining a matching that was (2+ϵ)-approximate, and hence not maximal. Our results are achieved using a new approach for converting amortized guarantees to worst-case ones for randomized data structures by going through a third type of guarantee, which is a middle ground between the two above: An algorithm is said to have worst-case expected update time ɑ if for every update σ, the expected time to process σ is at most ɑ. Although stronger than amortized expected, the worst-case expected guarantee does not resolve the fundamental problem of amortization: A worst-case expected update time of O(1) still allows for the possibility that every 1/ f(n) updates requires ϴ ( f(n) ) time to process, for arbitrarily high f(n) . In this article, we present a black-box reduction that converts any data structure with worst-case expected update time into one with a high-probability worst-case update time: The query time remains the same, while the update time increases by a factor of O (log 2(n) ). Thus, we achieve our results in two steps: (1) First, we show how to convert existing dynamic graph algorithms with amortized expected polylogarithmic running times into algorithms with worst-case expected polylogarithmic running times. (2) Then, we use our black-box reduction to achieve the polylogarithmic high-probability worst-case time bound. All our algorithms are Las-Vegas-type algorithms.

In 1999, Brodal and Fagerberg (BF) gave an algorithm for maintaining a low outdegree orientation of a dynamic uniformly sparse graph. Specifically, for a dynamic graph on n -vertices, with arboricity bounded by ɑ at all times, the BF algorithm supports edge updates in O (log n ) amortized update time, while keeping the maximum outdegree in the graph bounded by O ( ɑ ). Such an orientation provides a basic data structure for uniformly sparse graphs, which found applications to several dynamic graph algorithms, including adjacency queries and labeling schemes, maximal and approximate matching, approximate vertex cover, forest decomposition, and distance oracles. A significant weakness of the BF algorithm is the possible temporary blowup of the maximum outdegree, following edge insertions. Although BF eventually reduces all outdegrees to O ( ɑ ), some vertices may reach an outdegree of Ω( n ) during the process, and hence local memory usage at the vertices, which is an important quality measure in distributed systems, cannot be bounded. We show how to modify the BF algorithm to guarantee that the outdegrees of all vertices are bounded by O ( ɑ ) at all times, without hurting any of its other properties and present an efficient distributed implementation of the modified algorithm. This provides the first representation of distributed networks in which the local memory usage at all vertices is bounded by the arboricity (which is essentially the average degree of the densest subgraph) rather than the maximum degree. For settings where there is no strict limitation on the local memory, one may take the temporary outdegree blowup to the extreme and allow a permanent outdegree blowup. This allows us to address the second significant weakness of the BF algorithm—its inherently global nature: An insertion of an edge ( u,v ) may trigger changes in the orientations of edges that are arbitrarily far away from u and v . Such a non-local scheme may be prohibitively expensive in various practical applications. We suggest an alternative local scheme, which does not guarantee any outdegree bound on the vertices, yet is just as efficient as the BF scheme for some of the aforementioned applications. For example, we obtain a local dynamic algorithm for maintaining a maximal matching with sub-logarithmic update time in uniformly sparse networks, providing an exponential improvement over the state of the art in this context. We also present a distributed implementation of this scheme and some of its applications.

A problem of finding multicommodity minimum-cost flows in tree-like networks is considered. To solve this problem, an algorithm based on the reduction to a problem of finding a single-commodity flow in a network of arbitrary structure is proposed. For single-commodity flows in tree-like networks, an algorithm using a procedure of border reduction is used.

The three-in-a-tree problem is to determine if a simple undirected graph contains an induced subgraph which is a tree connecting three given vertices. Based on a beautiful characterization that is proved in more than twenty pages, Chudnovsky and Seymour [Combinatorica 2010] gave the previously only known polynomial-time algorithm, running in $O(mn^2)$ time, to solve the three-in-a-tree problem on an $n$-vertex $m$-edge graph. Their three-in-a-tree algorithm has become a critical subroutine in several state-of-the-art graph recognition and detection algorithms. In this paper we solve the three-in-a-tree problem in $\tilde{O}(m)$ time, leading to improved algorithms for recognizing perfect graphs and detecting thetas, pyramids, beetles, and odd and even holes. Our result is based on a new and more constructive characterization than that of Chudnovsky and Seymour. Our new characterization is stronger than the original, and our proof implies a new simpler proof for the original characterization. The improved characterization gains the first factor $n$ in speed. The remaining improvement is based on dynamic graph algorithms.

The maximum multicommodity flow problem is a natural generalization of the maximum flow problem to route multiple distinct flows. Obtaining a 1-ε approximation to the multicommodity flow problem on graphs is a well-studied problem. In this paper we present an adaptation of recent advances in single-commodity flow algorithms to this problem. As the underlying linear systems in the electrical problems of multicommodity flow problems are no longer Laplacians, our approach is tailored to generate specialized systems which can be preconditioned and solved efficiently using Laplacians. Given an undirected graph with m edges and k commodities, we give algorithms that find 1-ε approximate solutions to the maximum concurrent flow problem and maximum weighted multicommodity flow problem in time O(m4/3poly(k,ε-1)).

We study the following all-or-nothing multicommodity flow problem in planar graphs. Input: A graph G with n vertices and k pairs of vertices (s1, t1), (s2, t2),..., (sk, tk) in G. Find: A largest subset W of {1, ...., k such that for every i in W, we can send one unit of flow between si and ti. This problem is different from the well-known maximum edge-disjoint paths problem in that we do not require integral flows for the pairs. This problem is APX-hard even for trees, and a 2-approximation algorithm is known for trees. For general graphs, Chekuri et al. (STOC'04) give a poly-logarithmic factor approximation algorithm and show that a natural LP-relaxation has a poly-logarithmic integrality gap. This result is in contrast with the integrality gap Ω(√n) for the maximum edge-disjoint paths problem. Our main result considerably strengthens this result when an input graph is planar. Namely, for the all-or-nothing multicommodity flow problem in planar graphs, we give an O(1)-approximation algorithm and show that the integrality gap is O(1). In particular, in polynomial time, we can find an index set W with |W| = Ω(OPT) and eight si-ti paths for each i in W such that each edge is used at most eight times in these paths (with multiplicity), where OPT is the optimal value of the LP-relaxation of the all-or-nothing multicommodity flow problem. Our result can be compared to the recent result by S'eguin-Charbonneau and Shepherd (FOCS'11) who give an O(1)-approximation algorithm for the maximum edge-disjoint paths problem in planar graphs with congestion 2 (but not implied by this result).

In recent years, many service providers have started migrating their service offerings to cloud infrastructure. Sometimes, parts of the service workflow can however not be moved to cloud environments. This can occur due to client policies, or because some services are linked to physical client-site devices. The result of the migration is then a hybrid cloud environment, where part of the services are executed within the client network, while most of the processing is moved to the cloud. Migration to the cloud enables a more flexible deployment of services, but also increases the strain on underlying networks as most tasks are partially handled in a remote cloud, and no longer just in the local network. An important question that providers must answer before new service workflows are deployed is whether they can provide the workflow with sufficient quality of service, and whether the deployment will impact existing service workflows. In this paper we discuss strategies based on multi-commodity flow problems, a subset of graph flow problems that can be used to determine whether new service workflows can be sufficiently provisioned, and whether the addition of new workflows can negatively impact the performance of existing flows. We evaluate the proposed solution by comparing the performance of three approaches with respect to the number of successful workflows and with respect to their execution speed.

The multicommodity flow problem is a generalization of the minimum cost network flow problem. In this problem, several commodities governed by their own network flow constraints share the same underlying network. Given the supplies and demands of the different commodities, the shared capacity of each arc in the network, and cost of flow of each commodity on each arc, the objective is to determine the flow that minimizes the total cost. The multicommodity flow problem has been extensively applied to solve problems in areas such as transportation, telecommunications, and scheduling. In this article, we introduce the multicommodity flow problem, outline some of its applications, and describe efficient methods to solve the problem.

We consider the all-or-nothing multicommodity flow problem in general graphs. We are given a capacitated undirected graph G=(V,E,u) and set of k pairs s1t1, s2t2, …, sktk. Each pair has a unit demand. The objective is to find a largest subset S of 1,2,…,k such that for every i in S we can send a flow of one unit between si and ti. Note that this differs from the edge-disjoint path problem (EDP) in that we do not insist on integral flows for the pairs. This problem is NP-hard, and APX-hard, even on trees. For trees, a 2--approximation is known for the cardinality case and a 4--approximation for the weighted case. In this paper we build on a recent result of Racke on low congestion oblivious routing in undirected graphs to obtain a poly-logarithmic approximation for the all-or-nothing problem in general undirected graphs. The best previous known approximation for all-or-nothing flow problem was O(min(n

Decomposition based approaches are recalled from primal and dual point of view. The possibility of building partially disaggregated reduced master problems is investigated. This extends the idea of aggregated-versus-disaggregated formulation to a gradual choice of alternative level of aggregation. Partial aggregation is applied to the linear multicommodity minimum cost flow problem. The possibility of having only partially aggregated bundles opens a wide range of alternatives with different trade-offs between the number of iterations and the required computation for solving it. This trade-off is explored for several sets of instances and the results are compared with the ones obtained by directly solving the natural node-arc formulation. An iterative solution process to the route assignment problem is proposed, based on the well-known Frank Wolfe algorithm. In order to provide a first feasible solution to the Frank Wolfe algorithm, a linear multicommodity min-cost flow problem is solved to optimality by using the decomposition techniques mentioned above. Solutions of this problem are useful for network orientation and design, especially in relation with public transportation systems as the Personal Rapid Transit. A single-commodity robust network design problem is addressed. In this, an undirected graph with edge costs is given together with a discrete set of balance matrices, representing different supply/demand scenarios. The goal is to determine the minimum cost installation of capacities on the edges such that the flow exchange is feasible for every scenario. A set of new instances that are computationally hard for the natural flow formulation are solved by means of a new heuristic algorithm. Finally, an efficient decomposition-based heuristic approach for a large scale stochastic unit commitment problem is presented. The addressed real-world stochastic problem employs at its core a deterministic unit commitment planning model developed by the California Independent System Operator (ISO).

We define and efficiently compute the canonical flow on a graph, which is a certain feasible solution for the concurrent flow problem and exhibits invariance under the action of the automorphism group of the graph. Using estimates for the congestion of our canonical flow, we derive lower bounds on the crossing number, bisection width, and the edge and vertex expansion of a graph in terms of sizes of the edge and vertex orbits and the average distance in the graph. We further exhibit classes of graphs for which our lower bounds are tight within a multiplicative constant. Also, in cartesian product graphs a concurrent flow is constructed in terms of the concurrent flows in the factors, and in this way lower bounds for the edge and vertex expansion of the power graphs are derived in terms of that of the original graph.

A primal partitioning approach for single and non-simultaneous multicommodity flow problems