November 2024
Intermediate to advanced
416 pages
11h 11m
English
Earlier chapters have demonstrated various ways to use graphs to model connectivity and transportation problems. This chapter considers the overall capacity of networks and how things can flow through them. Imagine we want to model the amount of water that can flow through a network of pipes. We can use edge weights to represent how much water can flow between any two nodes, allowing us to determine the maximum capacity of the entire network.
The maximum-flow problem seeks to determine how much flow a graph can support when given edges with limited capacity. This phrasing is intentionally general. We could be modeling ...