Solving Maximum Flow Problems on Real World Bipartite Graphs

In this paper we present an experimental study of several maximum flow algorithms in the context of unbalanced bipartite networks. Our experiments are motivated by a real world problem of managing reservation-based inventory in Google content ad systems. We are interested in observing the performance of several push-relabel algorithms on our real world data sets and also on some generated ones. Previous work suggested an important improvement for pushrelabel algorithms on unbalanced bipartite networks: the two-edge push rule. We show how the two-edge push rule improves the running time. While no single algorithm dominates the results, we show there is one that has very robust performance in practice.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ALENEX
• Authors: Cosmin Silvestru Negruseri, Mircea Bogdan Pasoi, Barbara Stanley, Clifford Stein, Cristian George Strat
• Keywords: ALENEX 2007, ALENEX 2009, Algorithm, Two-edge Push Rule, Unbalanced Bipartite Networks