Fast and simple fully-dynamic cut tree construction

Abstract

A cut tree of an undirected weighted graph G = (V,E) encodes a minimum s-t-cut for each vertex pair {s, t}⊆V and can be iteratively constructed by n-1 maximum flow computations. They solve the multiterminal network flow problem, which asks for the all-pairs maximum flow values in a network and at the same time they represent n-1 non-crossing, linearly independent cuts that constitute a minimum cut basis of G. Hence, cut trees are resident in at least two fundamental fields of network analysis and graph theory, which emphasizes their importance for many applications. In this work we present a fully-dynamic algorithm that efficiently maintains a cut tree for a changing graph. The algorithm is easy to implement and has a high potential for saving cut computations under the assumption that a local change in the underlying graph does rarely affect the global cut structure. We document the good practicability of our approach in a brief experiment on real world data. © Springer-Verlag 2012.