Journal of the Operations Research Society of China ›› 2026, Vol. 14 ›› Issue (2): 719-729.doi: 10.1007/s40305-024-00567-8

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Direct Product Multicommodity Max-Concurrent-Flow Min-Sparse-Cut Theorem

Rui Guan1,2, Dong-Yue Liang2, Wei Wang3, Wei-Hua Yang2   

  1. 1 School of Mathematical Sciences and LPMC, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China;
    2 Department of Mathematics, Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan 030024, Shanxi, China;
    3 School of Mathematics and Statistics, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, Shaanxi, China
  • Received:2023-09-03 Revised:2024-09-02 Online:2026-06-30 Published:2026-07-06
  • Contact: Dong-Yue Liang E-mail:liangdongyue@tyut.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.12371356), Major Research Project of Shanxi Province (No.202202020101006).

Abstract: We extend the max-concurrent-flow min-sparse-cut theorem from product multicommodity to direct product multicommodity. We prove that $\Theta(\log k)$ is the tight gap between the max-concurrent-flow and the min-sparse-cut for direct product multicommodity, where $k$ is the number of commodities. Besides, when the network we consider is centralized, we prove that there is a $\frac{1}{\alpha}$-approximation algorithm for the sparsest cut problem, where $\alpha$ is the maximum weight ratio of vertices.

Key words: Multicommodity, Flow-cut gap, Sparsest cut, Approximation algorithm

CLC Number: