Flow Switching Approach to the Maximum Flow Problem: I

Abstract

An alternate approach to the maximum flow problem, based upon the switching or redistribution of flows in the local neighborhoods of a succession of cuts, is presented The switching process redistributes the flow locally by tracing only locahzed dtrected paths and can augment flow along several paths from source to terminal These features appear to be advantageous for large and dense networks The concepts of the flow switching approach are presented m part I together with a Flow Switching Algorithm (FSA) and Its proof. Part II will present the computational comparison of the FSA and the labehng method. © 1977, ACM. All rights reserved.