Algorithms - Lecture 8 - Ford-Fulkerson Analysis & Edmonds-Karp Algorithm

1 Complexity of the Ford-Fulkerson Algorithm

• Integer capcacities, Ford-Fulkerson algorithm terminates with an integer maximum flow after a finite number of iterations.
• Real capacities, can run forever, or converge to a suboptimal value.

2 Edmonds-Karp Maximum Flow Algorithm

2.1 High-level idea, (bottleneck)

• Variant of Ford-Fulkerson in which we always augment along a shortest augmenting path.
• Bottleneck edges of an augmenting path $P$. $\Delta$ denotes the capacity of a minimum-capacity edge of $P$.
• Bottleneck count of $e$, the number of iterations such that $e$ is a bottleneck edge on an augmenting path.
• Bound the bottleneck count of each edge within $O(V)$. Since each iteration increments bottleneck count at least one, number of iterations is $O(|E||V|)$.
• Terminates within $O(|E||V|)$ iterations, each iteration within $O(|E|)$ time, total $O(|E{|}^2|V|)$

2.2 Bottleneck lemma

• Vertex distances: $d(v,i)$ denotes the minimum length of a path of positive-capacity edges from $s$ to $v$ in $G_f$ after $i$ iterations. (No such path: $d(v,i)=\infty$, if $d(v,i)<\infty$ then $d(v,i)\le |V|-1$).
• For all $v$ in $V$, and all $i\ge 1$, we have $d(v,i-1)\le d(v,i)$.
• Bottleneck count of $(u,v)$ is at most $\max (1,|V|/2)$

3 Max-Flow Min-cut theorem

• For any flow network, a maximum flow exists in $G$ and the value of a maximum flow in $G$ is equal to the capacity of a minimum cut in $G$.