Transshipments over time, submodular functions, and discrete Newton
Presenter
March 30, 2023
Abstract
The Quickest Transshipment Problem is to route flow as quickly as possible from sources with supplies to
sinks with demands in a network with capacities and transit times on the arcs. It is of fundamental
importance for numerous applications in areas such as logistics, traffic, evacuation, and
finance. More than 25 years ago, Hoppe and Tardos presented the first (strongly) polynomial-time algorithm for this
problem. Their approach, as well as subsequently derived algorithms with strongly polynomial running
time, is hardly practical as it relies on parametric submodular function minimization via Megiddo's
parametric search. We present considerably faster algorithms for the Quickest Transshipment Problem
that instead employ a subtle extension of the Discrete Newton Method.
This improves the previously best known running time of $\tilde{O}(m^4k^{14})$ to $\tilde O(m^2k^5+m^3k^3+m^3n)$,
where $n$ is the number of nodes, $m$ the number of arcs, and $k$ the number of source and sink nodes.
Furthermore, we show how to compute integral quickest transshipments in $\tilde O(m^2k^6+m^3k^4+m^3n)$ time.
This is joint work with Miriam Schlöter and Khai Van Tran.